Bed of Roses
by kerlin
Summary: [GSR] The time and the miles between them have only served to make the thorns more apparent.
1. Prologue

**Rating:** PG-13  
**Summary:** The time and the miles between them have only served to make the thorns more apparent.  
**Spoilers:** Oh, probably. Nothing specific off the top of my head, though. Consider at least the first two seasons fair game.  
**Disclaimer:** So not mine. And I seriously doubt I'm using them for their intended purposes. But isn't that half the fun?  
**Author's Note:**Thanks to buggs, for the swift kicks in the eema and the cheering section and the "I hate you"s. And to elishavah, for her vastly superior knowledge of Boston geography and legal systems. And to both of them collectively for the beta tweaks.

For those interested, the title comes from the Bon Jovi song of the same title. The rest of the words only apply in the vaguest possible way, though the two lines that helped drive the story - "I wanna lay you down in a bed of roses/For tonight I sleep on a bed of nails" - are still very apt.

* * *

Sara stetched under the blankets and reflected on the fact that the biting cold invading her apartment was probably one of the few reasons she would ever wish to huddle under the covers and sleep in. She squinted at the alarm clock and considered just closing her eyes and staying in the warm cocoon for a full ten seconds - and then on cue, the coffee maker in the kitchen clicked on and began gargling its way toward making two cups of coffee. 

That did it. She braced herself and threw the covers off, shivering, and quickly pulled on several layers of jogging clothes, topped by a black watch cap pulled snug down over her ears and thick ski gloves. She had exactly one half-hour before the coffee was finished, and she was out the door within two minutes of first getting out of bed.

Cambridge in the thin light of a midwinter late-afternoon held an ethereal timeless quality to it even as Sara paced herself past eighteenth-century brownstone houses with a few carefully anonymous late model cars parked on the street. Ice salt crunched under her sneakers, and the cold invaded her lungs with little tiny knives. She just ran faster, rounding the corner, and a few minutes later she was along the half-frozen Charles and the noise from Boston echoed across the river to prod her on even faster.

While she could no longer feel her nose, cheeks, and forehead, her limbs had loosened and warmed, and she was moving quickly when she banked right to head toward Harvard Square. It was busy, and crowded, but then it always was, and she knew which side streets would let her make a circuit of the main area without interrupting the flows of people.

She bypassed the elevator at her apartment building to take the stairs at a run, all six flights of them, skipping steps and catching a hand on the banister to swing around the landings easily. When she entered the apartment, the coffee machine was bubbling to an end and Sara poured the first cup and sifted in the sugar with quick, efficient movements. The first mouthful scalded her tongue and she made a moue of frustration before blowing on the liquid for a few seconds and trying again.

Half the cup was gone in time it took to travel from the kitchen to the living room, where she flipped the computer on, and the second half of the cup was gone by the time she returned to the kitchen and set the cup on the counter. She began lifting layers of clothing as she made her way to the bedroom and its adjoining bath. The hot water sluiced the sweat from her body and restored tingling feeling to her cheeks.

Twenty minutes later Sara was seated at her computer, hair wrapped in a towel, doing the usual run-through of junk mail and forensics newsletters while sipping the second cup of coffee. She quirked her eyebrow at several anatomically impossible offers and forwarded a comparative analysis on fingerprint powder to the usual suspects in her address book. And it seemed that one of her San Francisco contacts had reciprocated; two forwards of articles that she dropped onto her desktop to read later.

It was a careful routine - precision embodied in the mastery of small, everyday tasks. Step by step by step and before she realized it, four months had passed. She wasn't sure whether it disturbed her more that she'd stopped counting, or that she didn't know when she'd stopped counting.

And thoughts like that had no place in the routine. Unsettled, she shut the computer down and went to dry her hair, focusing on the action at hand. Lift the damp hair, stretch it out with the brush, press the dryer close in. Repeat.

Six o'clock, and the weak winter sunlight was giving way to a slow sunset as Sara exited the bathroom and saw the cup of coffee still sitting beside the computer. She frowned at it, and with jerky movements dumped the rest of the coffee in the sink and washed the mug, the coffee pot, and refilled the reservoir for tomorrow morning. Her fingers stilled across the bag of coffee with a slight smile before she opened it to pour the coffee in the filter - 

She'd forgotten to empty the old filter. She stood and stared at it, uncomprehending, coffee bag poised in mid-air. Carefully, she set the bag back on the counter and pinched the sides of the wet filter together, leaning over to toss it in the trash can under the sink. Lips pressed tightly into a thin line, she set a clean filter inside and sifted out dry grounds, pushing the coffee maker back against the wall and flicking the timer on.

Deep breaths, in and out, as she pressed her palms against the edge of the counter, fingers curled tightly inward, nails scraping the countertop slightly. Her knuckles were white and fine tremors shook her body as she watched the blood leave her hands from the force of her grip. They didn't look like her hands at all, looked like they belonged to a corpse, an unbreathing slab of flesh laid out on the autopsy table, ready for someone to cut up and learn all its secrets -

Air exploded from her lungs and sparks danced before her vision as her body protested the lack of oxygen. Sara hadn't even realized she'd been holding her breath.

Pushing off from the counter, she snatched up hat, gloves, scarf, and coat on her way out the door.


	2. Chapter 1

"What are you doing here, Sara?"

"Checking Eric Gahagan's credit card records," she replied without looking up from the sheets of paper spread out over the layout table. "I could ask the same of you."

"DB in the Charles," Carl replied by way of explanation, and she looked up at him. The day shift supervisor was leaned against the doorjamb, legs crossed at the ankle, head tipped to the side as he watched her.

"Suspicious circs?" Sara asked, and he shook his head.

"Looks accidental. Drowning - some kid with more brains than common sense went out on the ice on a dare."

"Harvard or MIT?" she asked, offering him a tight, humorless smile.

He snorted. "Berkelee."

"Huh." They looked at each other for a moment. "Go home, Carl."

"I'm already late enough to bring down Julia's wrath. A few more minutes won't make a difference." He entered the room, and her hairs stood on end as she silently begged him to leave her alone with the records. "Are you okay, Sara?"

"Sure," she said, and this time the smile was the thin-lipped one she used when she was trying not to throw up during a decomp. "Hot case."

They were both well aware that Eric Gahagan was under suspicion for embezzling no more than five thousand dollars, and they both avoided the issue by mutual unspoken agreement.

"Look, Julia's been nagging me to have you over for dinner again," Carl said, breaking the silence. "Come over tomorrow. It's lasagna night. It'll...give you something to do."

Now, the smile was genuine. "Lasagna?"

"Don't worry, Lizzie's going through a vegetarian phase." He moved as if to touch her shoulder, then thought better of it, and Sara bit back the sigh of relief. "Come by around six and I promise I won't let you leave until your shift starts."

"Carl..."

"Sara..." he mimicked. "Please?"

She blew air out through her lips in a mock-dramatic sigh. "All right. But only if you don't make Rob ask for my help with his physics homework again."

Carl had an easy, open smile that warmed his face considerably from its usual nondescript appearance. "Hey, he wanted to. He just needed encouragement."

Sara rolled her eyes. "I bet. He was terrified. Don't you remember being seventeen, Carl?"

"Nope," he responded without missing a beat. "I've repressed it."

"That ought to tell you something right there." She finally leaned back slightly in the chair, relaxing her shoulders ever so slightly. "I'll be there at six. Now, go home to your family."

He grinned, and touched her shoulder, a feather-light brush that was gone before she even felt it, and moved around the table to exit, stopping at the doorjamb once more and looking back at her over his shoulder. "Sara..." At her impassive look, he seemed to think better of it, and shook his head. "Never mind. Good night."

"Good night, Carl."

She heard more than saw him leave as she turned her attention back to the lists of information in front of her.

_12/03/03, Belden's Jeweler's, $1,387..._

~*~

Sara speared a piece of eggplant with her fork and dipped it in the sauce before bringing it to her mouth, chewing carefully to process the flavor.

"Well? What do you think?" Lizzie asked eagerly, leaning forward from where she was seated across the table.

It needed a bit more garlic, but Sara smiled and swallowed. "It's very good, Lizzie."

"Sweet," she said with a grin, and attacked her own food. "Dad and Rob think eggplant is disgusting, and Mom is never good for impartial opinions," she explained, mouth full of pasta.

"Lizzie," Julia Linden said reproachfully, and the teenager rolled her eyes and made a very deliberate swallow before addressing herself once again to Sara.

"Why did you decide to become a vegetarian, Sara?"

Sara's hand froze midway in the air for a split second, and then continued back to the plate, where she made her gestures carefully nonchalant as she separated noodle and cheese. "I - ah, it was a crime scene. Sort of. An experiment based on a crime scene - you know what, it's really not good dinner conversation."

Julia looked slightly green, Carl chuckled ruefully, and Lizzie looked fascinated. "Really. Cool."

_Yeah,_ Sara's thoughts ran away from her, _more like cold, so cold we had to huddle together for warmth, and -_

"Sara, are you okay?" Carl asked, and she realized that the fork had been paused in front of her lips for entirely too long. Gamely, she stuffed the lasagna in her mouth and chewed, nodding in response.

"Lizzie, it's not really polite to interrogate guests at the dinner table," Julia chastised her daughter gently, and received an eye-roll once again.

"We read _The Jungle_ in school," Lizzie chattered by way of explanation, tearing off a piece of garlic bread, chewing and swallowing while looking at her mother before continuing. "And we had to do all this research, and Marcy started it, really, when Dan did his presentation on the meat industry."

"Oh," was all Sara could reply, and wondered if she'd ever been that talkative as a teenager. Not about literature, that much was for certain, and there was only so long you could talk excitedly about organic chemistry before everyone else's eyes glazed over and you were only receiving polite smiles and nods in return.

Carl offered her a rueful smile. "So, Rob, do you have any physics homework tonight?"

Sara glared at him.

Rob, a gangly, painfully shy boy of seventeen, nearly choked on his beans. "I - uh - no - I mean, it's bio, genetics and evolution, and I already finished most of it, really - "

"You'd be better off with your dad for that," Sara said lightly, trying to calm the poor kid down before he had a stroke at the table. "He's the biologist."

"We'll take a look at it after dinner, Robbie," Carl promised him with a smile. Out of their father's line of sight, Sara watched Lizzie mouth "Robbie" at her brother and he blushed a deep crimson and stared determinedly at his plate.

The grandfather clock in the hallway chimed, and Sara looked down at her watch out of instinct. 6:45.

"Sara," Carl said with a raised eyebrow. "I know for a fact that there's nothing more pressing than the trace on the Holland case waiting for you, and that will take you all of ten minutes."

"I wasn't - " she began to deny quickly, and fixed a wobbly smile on her face. "Habit, I guess." How could she explain to the man who was the closest thing to a best friend she had in Boston that his perfect family was tearing her apart inside? To show him that she was trying to enjoy the evening, she speared a piece of cucumber and dabbed it in the vinaigrette, bringing it to her mouth with gusto.

There was a brief moment of silence, and then Lizzie was off and running again. "Mom, do you think we could go out tomorrow night and start to look for a dress for the Winter Ball? Marcy got hers at Filene's, and she doesn't even have a date yet, and Mark's already asked me, so I have even more of a reason to need a dress..."

No, Sara decided, she had never been that talkative. She took a sip of milk to forestall the slow burn in her stomach and wished that it were wine so that it could do something to block the memories, too.

~*~

"What is forensic entomology," Sara muttered at the television screen, and this time she had a wine glass gripped between her fingers. She poured half of the liquid down her throat in the time it took for one of the Jeopardy contestants to buzz in with the answer.

"Forensic entomology is the answer!" Alex said cheerfully, and the contestant grinned widely when he won eight hundred dollars. _Kind of a gimme question for eight hundred,_ Sara thought bitterly.

Carl's head jerked up from the kitchen table when he heard Alex's voice, and he looked across the length of the double room at Sara. She returned his gaze with a steady look that was designed to convince him that she was fine.

"Ewwww," Lizzie squealed from where she was curled into the corner of the couch. "They do that? Have you ever done that?"

That necessitated another gulp of wine. If this was the topic of conversation much longer, she wouldn't be going to work sober tonight. "Not really. There are people who specialize in it."

"Have you ever worked with one?"

_Nope, definitely not going to work sober._

"Lizzie!" Carl called from the table. "Don't you have homework?"

"Just some Spanish," she called back.

"Next commercial break, I want you at the table and doing it," her father responded firmly, and Alex chose that moment to announce that Jeopardy would be right back. Sara closed her eyes in relief.

Lizzie sighed dramatically and pushed up from the couch to go and get her backpack.

"Rob, I think you're okay for now. Call me if you need anything," Carl told his son, gripping his shoulder firmly before coming over to take Lizzie's vacant seat on the couch. "I'm sorry."

"What for?" Sara twirled the stem of the nearly empty wine glass between her fingers, focusing on the straw colored liquid as it clung to the inside of the glass. It had an almost hypnotic quality to its movements, and before she knew it, her vision was blurred and the white wine had become champagne, raised in a toast - 

"Lizzie, she..." Carl paused and regrouped to try again.

"It's okay, Carl," she told him, setting the wine down on the coffee table, suddenly unwilling to look at it. "I'm fine." The commercial switched to cute puppies sliding across kitchen floors to the tune of an annoying pet food jingle. "I'm fine," she repeated, whispering almost to herself.

"Whew," Julia said cheerfully, re-entering the family room from the small side room that served as an office. "I'm so sorry, but I had to take that call. A mother panicked about her son's B+." She shook her head with a chuckle. "You try reassuring a mother that a B+ on a French test in eighth grade is not going to ruin his chances of going to Harvard." 

Sara laughed, a genuine sound of amusement, and Carl relaxed as his wife plopped down on the couch beside him, tucking her feet up under her and leaning slightly into her husband. Julia, Sara was convinced, was a genuine modern-day saint with the ability to make everyone around her instantly at ease.

"Ah, I see I missed the end of the forensics category," Julia observed as Jeopardy came back on. "Maybe the final question will be about France and I can trump the two CSIs," she said with a mischievous grin.

As it turned out, the final question was about African politics, something none of them were at all familiar with - and apparently none of the contestants, either. They were all docked points, and in the end, the contestant who had answered the entomology question was the winner - by eight hundred dollars. Forensic entomology had saved him. Alex and he agreed that yes, it really was ironic that the last question he'd answered, and about such an obscure subject, would win him the game...

Carl changed the channel.


	3. Chapter 2

When Sara entered the break room, the other CSIs quieted down immediately. She stopped at the door for a second, unnerved, but decided to continue as if nothing had happened. 

Taking a seat, she set the file in front of her and opened it up, trying to concentrate on the words but not really reading them.

"Hey, Sara, did you get what you wanted from Gahagan's computer?" Jonas queried gently, his head lowered slightly to meet her eyes, and then raised when she looked at him.

"I did, thanks, Jonas. The hack you gave me did the trick," she replied with a warm smile. He returned it with a wide grin.

Jonas Whitmore was a relentlessly plain man in his late forties, a shy, laid-back investigator who specialized in anything to do with computers. He held two post-graduate degrees from MIT and had to be frequently reminded that the Red Sox played baseball and the Patriots played football, not the other way around. In her first weeks here, he had harbored a crush on Sara, but it had quickly given way to a warm affection and the closest thing to friendship that either of them could attempt.

Next to him, Maggie stretched a rubber band on her fingers, squinting and aiming at Alec, who was absorbed in the editorial sections of the day's Boston Globe. She let the elastic go, but instead of hitting Alec's newspaper, it zinged over Sara's shoulder, clipping her hair and just barely missing her cheek before it finally smacked against the cabinet.

Maggie snickered, trying to bite back the grin that threatened to split her face, and slumped in her chair slightly when Alec merely gave her an annoyed look over the top of the newspaper. Sara placed her hands flat on the file, trying to quell her murderous thoughts. Maggie was the youngest CSI in the group, having graduated BC just last spring and joined CSI in the fall. Her father was a homicide captain, one brother was in Vice, and another worked in narcotics. The rest of her very large Irish Catholic family was spread out through Boston's governmental and ecclesiastical infrastructure in a way that made it impossible to get anything done in Boston without going through at least one of them.

She was also an ambitious, relentless flirt whose attentions were currently focused on Alec. That alone would have guaranteed a distinctly uneasy working relationship with her, in Sara's mind, if she hadn't taken to mimicking Alec's opinions as well - one of which was an utter hatred of Sara.

Alec Tremain had the kind of features and build that screamed English country gentleman. He was Oxford-educated, coldly intellectual, and a ruthless politicion. He was also a brilliant CSI - in fact, his solve rate had been the stuff of incredulous water-cooler gossip and there had been no doubt he would succeed as night shift supervisor someday in the near future.

At least, not until Sara had arrived.

Since then, Alec had faced unexpected competition for the number one slot, and so far, he was losing. Thomas Roman, the night shift supervisor, had rather decidedly transferred his attention to Sara after her first week in Boston, and her subsequent promotion to the key position on the team, vacated the week before she'd arrived, had been an unforgiveable transgression in Alec's eyes.

Sara's thoughts wandered through the maze of interpersonal relationships on the night shift, and she let them roam as if she were analyzing a network of people involved in a crime. But all too soon, they bumped up against the rigid wall in her mind that cordoned off other thoughts on interoffice relationships, and she harnessed them again carefully, re-focusing on the final report of Gahagan's embezzling that she hoped to put in the out box when the night's briefing was over.

"Good evening, everyone," Thomas called cheerfully as he entered the room and sat down at the head of the table.

Boston's night shift CSIs might have their personal squabbles, but every single one of them was dedicated without question to their shift supervisor. He had been a CSI for longer than most of them had been alive, and had an international reputation in the field for his specialty in forensic psychology.

Maggie sat up straight, Alec folded the newspaper carefully and set it down, Jonas tucked the hand-held gadget he'd been playing with into a pocket, and Sara closed the file to give her full attention to the older man.

"Jonas, Maggie, you have a body found at Boston Sand and Gravel," he began, sliding the assignment slip across to Jonas as primary.

"Suspicious circs?" Maggie asked, bouncing in her seat like an overeager terrier. She had only started doing murders last month.

"The body was found buried under over a ton of gravel," Thomas replied dryly. "I think that fits the definition of suspicious circumstances."

"Partial decomp," Jonas read with a sigh. "We're going to smell all week."

"Lemons," Sara suggested with a smile that quickly turned sour as the memory tracked itself to its source.

"Lemons?" Maggie asked, looking to Alec for an answer. He didn't oblige her, but Thomas did.

"It's the only thing that really gets rid of the smell," he explained. "Jorgensen is waiting for you at the scene."

"I'll drive," Maggie said, and was out of the room before Jonas had even finished standing.

"Better hurry, Jonas, she'll leave you behind," Alec commented sarcastically, and Jonas rolled his eyes as he left the room.

"Alec," Thomas continued, "it looks like your penthouse burglars have struck again. The Four Seasons, this time. Apparently, they took over ten thousand dollars' worth of jewelry."

"It seems they're escalating," Alec observed, taking the assigment slip. "That's the second hotel this week."

"My thoughts exactly. The mayor is concerned about the effect this will have on tourism, and the chief of police is beginning to lean on CSI," Thomas told him. "Am I clear?"

"Crystal," Alec responded promptly, and stood. He paused for a moment, obviously interested in hearing what Sara had received as an assignment, but Thomas merely looked at him, and the younger CSI exited with one last glance in Sara's direction.

"Sara, how is the colloquium planning going?" Thomas asked, and Sara narrowed her eyes in confusion at the abrupt change of subjet.

"It's going well," she answered warily. "I have an appointment with someone from the chemistry department at Harvard tomorrow to see if we can use one of their labs for a few of the presentations. Phillip Rosten in particular wanted a fume hood for his talk."

"I'm not even going to ask," Thomas said with a wry chuckle.

For the past month, Sara had been working in conjunction with Carl and Marianne, the swing shift supervisor, as well as professors from MIT and Harvard to set up what would be one of the largest forensic science colloquiums in the country - if not the world. It promised to function both as a knowledge exchange and recruitment center for students attending New England's numerous colleges and universities.

"Ah...apart from that, things are progressing...do we have a crime scene tonight?" She finally gave up on the small talk; Thomas knew perfectly well how the colloquium planning was going. He received memo updates twice a week.

"How are you doing, Sara?" he asked bluntly, going straight to the point.

Ah. So that was what this was about. And she knew exactly where the place the blame. "Talk to Carl?"

"We care about you," he parried.

"I don't believe this," she muttered under her breath, rubbing her hand over her face and pinching the bridge of her nose. "I'm fine. We've had this conversation before, Thomas, and my answer is the same. I'm _fine_."

"You're not wearing your wedding ring."

_Now_ she was pissed off. "It kind of comes with divorce. Do we have a crime scene?" she snarled through gritted teeth, her body shaking with emotion.

"Multiple homicide," he answered, sliding her the assignment slip, apparently sensing that he had not only crossed the line, he'd nearly gone over a cliff.

"I'll drive," she snapped, taking the assignment slip and stalking out of the room.


	4. Chapter 3

"Sara? Sara Sidle?"

Sara spun in place from where she was studying the displayed articles detailing the accomplishments of Harvard's chemistry lab and regarded the man trotting toward her with no small amount of suspicion. "That's me."

"I can't believe this!"

Apparently, she was supposed to know him. Six feet, nicely muscled without overdoing it, clean shaven, curly brown hair...he was talking again.

"Man, it's been what, ten, fifteen years?" He shook his head and ran his hand through his hair, grinning hugely. "You haven't changed a bit."

"I, ah..." She squinted at him. Still no glimmer of recognition. "I'm sorry - this is really embarassing, but who are you?"

A blush colored his cheekbones and he ducked his head. "Wow, ouch. You'd think the person you joined the Mile High Club with would...uhm..."

"Ken Fuller." Stunned, she stared at him, and memories began rushing back. "You shaved. And - you broke your nose."

He laughed. "Yeah, well, Kim made me shave the beard off."

"Kim?" She raised an eyebrow. "Not Kim Delacroix."

"We just had our second daughter," he proclaimed proudly. "Want to see pictures?"

A thousand alarm bells went off in Sara's head and she brought the binder she was holding up in self-defense. "No - that's - ah - Ken - "

He looked at her curiously for a moment, and then shrugged it off. "Yeah, you're right, we have to get to work. Follow me - we're thinking 219 would work. You remember the room, don't you?"

Sara groaned theatrically. "Third-year organic chemistry. Eight AM Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And I'd tried so hard to repress it."

Ken laughed as they walked toward the stairwell. "Don't take this the wrong way, but - you're not at all what I expected. I mean, the memo said I was supposed to meet a Mrs. Grissom. I guess they mixed up the names or something. Anyway, it's good to see you again."

She froze in the middle of the hallway and clutched the binder so tightly she was sure it would slice through her hands, flesh and bone, blood on the shining tiled hallways of Harvard University's chemistry building. Ken continued ahead, and didn't notice that she hadn't followed him until he reached the doorway to the stairwell.

"Sara? You okay?"

"I'm - " She bit back "fine" and swallowed hard. "I filed for divorce this weekend."

His hand slid down the doorjamb from where he'd placed it to turn and look for her. "Oh." The drone of a TA teaching a first year physics lab section filled the air as Ken struggled for words. "I'm...sorry."

A thousand words were circling in panicked streams through her mind, and none of them would combine to form a coherent sentence. She opened her mouth to blurt out something, anything, and found that it was heavy and dry.

"It's okay," she finally rasped out, the words drowning out the nearby physics lesson. "It's okay, y'know?" She instructed her leg to bend and take a step forward, and the other followed suit. "219, you said? Does it still have that hideous peach paint job?"

"Oh, yeah," he confirmed, obviously relieved to end the awkwardness. "But it has a fume hood, and the capacity you said you thought you needed."

~*~

It was nearly noon by the time Sara returned home and dumped her purchases on the counter. She'd stopped by a nearby market and picked up some fresh fruit and vegetables to replace her waning supply. She hummed softly as she arranged the various legumes in the fridge and cabinets, and had just dug her thumbnail into an orange to begin to peel it when there was a knock on the door.

She set the orange on the counter and stuck her thumb in her mouth to suck off the bitter juices as she crossed to the door. A quick peek through the Judas hole told her it was her neighbor's adolescent son, Jesse, standing with a sheepish grin on his face.

"Hey, Jesse," she said, leaning on the half-open door.

"This got left for you today," he told her, holding out a small package. "Mom brought it into our apartment 'cause she was worried about someone taking it, or doing something funny to it," he added by way of explanation. "It's from Las Vegas," he continued. "That's pretty cool."

Sara's heart skipped two full beats as she took the package with numb fingers. "I used to live there," she told him, and forced herself to look down at the return address. Greg Sanders. "It's from a friend," she told him. "Probably a late Christmas present."

"Cool," he repeated, bobbing his head and sticking his hands into the front pockets of his jeans. "Anyway, just bringing it over. See you around."

"You too, Jesse," she said with a smile, and closed the door.

Sara set the package down on the counter beside the flattened grocery bag and traced the return address with a finger. She wasn't sure if she was relieved or disappointed that the package was from Greg. Grinding her teeth furiously, she pushed those thoughts from her mind and opened a drawer to get out a pair of scissors.

Coffee. She grinned as she reached into the box and pulled the bag out, a match to the one she had used that morning to set up the coffee pot. Blue Hawaiian coffee. She opened the cabinet and set the full bag next to its nearly empty counterpart, shaking her head in amusement.

He wouldn't have just sent the bag with no explanation, not Greggo, and she turned back to the small box to find several sheets of paper folded in the bottom. She tipped the box upside down to spill them out on the counter, and separated them by sender.

Greg and Nick both sent long letters of several pages each, and Catherine and Warrick short notes that she read right there. Carefully bland, impersonal inquiries about the weather (it must be such a change from Las Vegas) and the lab (how was working for the legendary Thomas Roman?) and a few lines about interesting cases they'd had in the past few weeks. Not a hint of emotion, or of worry - in fact, carefully the opposite.

She couldn't help herself. She looked back in the box, just in case.

There were no more letters.

~*~

The alarm woke her after five hours of fitful sleep, an hour earlier than she usually set it for, and for a moment she couldn't remember why, and then she saw the two letters on the nightstand and a wistful smile touched her lips.

The bath salts Catherine had given her as a going-away gift were still half-full and on the very top shelf of her medicine cabinet. Tall as she was, she had to stand on the tips of her toes to get the jar down without the risk of breaking it. She chose the peaches and cream partition, digging in with the little wooden spoon and spreading the crystals out evenly into the steaming water. A few minutes later, the tub had filled entirely and the bathroom smelled of steam and peaches.

Toes in first, and she nearly curled her foot in on itself, the water was so hot. A few seconds later, she tried again, and stepped into the tub, lowering herself inch by inch and then settling the bath pillow beneath her neck. The scalding water worked its magic, and she could begin to feel the tense muscles caused by the nightmare soften and uncoil.

_Hey Sara,_

_I hope you like the coffee. I remembered you seemed happy to get the bag I gave you as a going-away gift, and when I ran the numbers, I guessed you must be almost out by now. _

_I got to do a home invasion last week with Nick and Warrick. It was pretty cool, even if they didn't let me do much more than fingerprint and photograph. Nick says there might be room on the team soon, and that I should put in an application. He thinks I've got a pretty good chance of getting the job. Oh, and as for the room - I bet you were about to kill me there for not saying why it might be there - Ecklie's gone on to greener pastures and joined up with the FBI. I guess all that bootlicking during the Strip Strangler case finally paid off. He's in Virgina supervising one of their labs. Anyway, Catherine put her name into the hat for the promotion. She says it would give her more time to spend with Lindsey now that she's in middle school and at "that age."_

_Jacqui says hi. She just stopped by to pick up some evidence that Warrick wanted me to extract DNA from before sending it down to her to print. She says to recommend you this little bar on Landsdowne Street. Apparently there are nachos to die for. She's gone now - let me know if you end up going to the bar so I can tell her. She'd like that._

_It's same-old, same-old here. We got a new sheriff, and he's an even bigger jerk than Mobley and Atwater were. He's started this whole campaign to get Las Vegas away from its Sin City reputation. In other words, take all the fun out of the place. So he's putting a lot of pressure on the PD to work harder. It's been pretty stressful around here._

_Yes, it's been stressful, and yes, I'm still writing you from work. Calm down. You're the CSI - notice how many times I'm starting and stopping this thing. It'll probably be days before I actually finish it. The only free time I have is when all the machines are running tests and there's nothing I can prep by hand in the meantime. So, not much._

_And that was Warrick. Wanted to know if I was writing love letters. I told him I was. Ha! He's pissy because the sample on his glove was degraded too badly for a match. I may be a genius, but I can't do magic. Yet._

_Anyway, we all miss you._

_Ciao, bella._

_Greg_

"All" was underlined, and Sara closed her eyes tightly, until she could see spots behind her eyelids and tell herself the moisture trickling down her face was steam.

_Dear Sara,_

_My mother would kill me if she knew I was writing this. I can hear her now - "you don't even write me at Christmas!" I would say that you don't nag as much but...naahhh._

_Nothing much has changed here. Cath might be going to day shift, because Ecklie's left for the FBI. Carvallo had to bribe people with holiday pay to attend the going away party. Warrick and I didn't go, but we took some of the leftover cake out of the fridge and then went and got good and drunk at the bar around the corner. You'll remember it - it's where we took you when you made CSI 3._

_Damn, girl, we miss you. There's no one to get excited about freaky new DBs, and Greg -_

There was whiteout after the first G in Greg. Sara stared at the name, ran her thumb over it, and thought of all the myriad ways she could find out exactly what Nick had started to write, but the truth was, she already knew - and she didn't want it confirmed.

_Greg mopes around the lab. The new CSI is big into the by-the-books way of doing things. He's also managed to piss Bobby off pretty good about something, so any ballistics stuff has to go through the rest of us. Bobby's not talking, Newbie's tight-lipped. Even Catherine couldn't get it out of either of them._

_Okay, and now you see why I don't write many letters. This is boring. I'm sorry. I just...I don't know what else to say. I wish I knew now, I wish I'd known then what words to use. All I can say is that I miss you._

_Jeez, okay, before this gets really absurd, I'm going to go. I've got vacation days saved up, and I hear Boston in the springtime is beautiful. Put some time aside for me, y'hear?_

_Nick_

Sara set the letters aside on the sink and sank a little deeper into the water, up to her chin. Her legs were too long to immerse herself fully, and her knees and the tips of her toes peeked out of the water and cooled quickly. She flexed experimentally; her knees were hot, and then cooled off, and then hot again, and before she knew it, water was sloshing out of the sides of the tub and onto the bathroom floor, soaked up by the thick rug.

At the first splat of water on tile, she froze, and the momentum of the water carried a wave of peach-scented liquid into her mouth. She choked and sputtered and sat up quickly, coughing so hard tears came to her eyes. Heaving herself half out of the tub, she leaned over, still coughing occasionally.

For a few, brief, seconds, she gave in, and her body shook with sobs instead of coughs, but she slammed the flat of her hand hard against the edge of the bathtub once, twice, and then a third time, and the pain brought her back to herself with a shuddering awareness.

The cool edge of the bathtub pressed against her painfully thin ribs, and the water was now low enough so that the tips of her toes poked out no matter what she did. She curled her fingers around the edge of the sink and pulled herself out of the tub, nearly slipping in the water when she put her foot down, instead knocking her knee painfully against the toilet.

She grew cold quickly, and wrapped a towel around her shivering body. She left the letters on the edge of the sink when she left the bathroom.


	5. Chapter 4

Sara fiddled with the knobs of the microscope slightly, bringing the fiber into clear focus. Organic fiber - hemp, probably. She'd have to send it down to trace to be sure. At any rate, it matched the heft and weave of the fiber she'd pulled from the shoes of their suspect, which meant she had placed him at the crime scene.

Her pager chose exactly that moment to go off; Thomas wanted her in his office to pick up the info on an suspected rape, and then to go process the victim at Beth Israel. Time-sensitive evidence; Sara cleaned up as quickly as she could and was shouldering her way out the lab door when Marianne, the swing shift supervisor, called her name from further inside the lab.

"What is it?" Sara asked the older woman, and shifted her weight impatiently.

"There have been some scheduling issues with Day 5," Marianne told her, brandishing a sheet of paper. Sara glanced at it, but couldn't read anything that was printed on it; the other woman was waving it too rapidly. "I need you to sign off on this and then pass it on to Carl to work around the problems."

"Look, I've got to go - I trust you, make whatever changes need to be done. We'll go over them later, okay?" Without waiting for a response, she took off at a jog, heading for Thomas's office.

"Sara!" Marianne yelled after her, and Sara waved behind her back as she rounded the corner.

"I came as quickly as I could," she told Thomas, leaning in his office. He looked up from the form he was filling out and gestured for her to enter.

"I can see that," he observed mildly, raising an eyebrow at her slightly accelerated breathing. "Victim is a student at BU, Morgan Hayes." He passed her the sheet.

"And she's at Beth Israel...why? Doesn't BU have its own health center?" Sara scanned the sheet quickly.

"It was closest," he responded simply, and Sara ground her teeth. Something told her there was evidence that would soon remove the prefix "suspected" from the charge.

"I'm gone," she said, and spun on her heels to exit at the same jog she'd entered.

* * *

"Dr. Coriander!" Sara stood on her toes to try to flag down the serologist's attention. Tall as she was, the businessman in front of her was still taller and was wearing a cap against the cold. Frustrated, she pushed her way past him.

It was no longer holiday season, but Boston's Logan Airport was still incredibly busy, and fully half of those waiting at the gate seemed to be carrying placards indicating they were waiting for passengers travelling to the area on business. The one Sara was holding up to wave to Dr. Coriander had the logo developed for their colloquium in the upper right corner, "Dr. Megan Coriander" in the center, and the logos of Harvard, MIT, and Boston Criminalistics arranged along the bottom.

"Sara!" Megan recognized her and waved back, maneuvering her rolling carry-on awkwardly around the turnstiles. "You didn't have to come meet me yourself."

Sara grinned and reciprocated a kiss on the cheek. "Are you kidding? I had to draw straws with Thomas and Carl."

The other woman laughed and shook her head, slinging her arm around Sara's shoulder as they made their way to the baggage claim area. "That Thomas. Did I ever tell you he once thought himself madly in love with me?"

"Megan!" Sara returned, mildly embarassed, and couldn't help but laugh. There was something about Megan Coriander that blended elegance, blunt honesty, and pure brilliance to make her one of the most fascinating and charismatic people Sara had ever encountered.

"Yes, well, young forensics investigators in love," Megan replied with a melodramatic sigh. "It was destined not to be. I lost him to serial killers and he lost me to blood spatter."

The moving luggage counters sputtered into life just as they arrived, and they stood next to each other amid the crowds of other people who had arrived from San Francisco on the same flight. They were silent for a few moments as everyone around them chattered with their newly reunited friends and loved ones.

"How are you, Sara?" Megan finally asked, her tone serious for the first time since she'd disembarked from the plane.

Sara stuck her hands in the back pockets of her corduroys and rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. "Why does everyone keep asking me that?"

"Because we - "

"Care about you," Sara finished for her. "I'm going to have the words 'I'm fine' engraved somewhere permanent and clearly visible."

"Still so private," Megan mused.

Sara was incredibly tempted to fire back "Still so nosy," but exercised better judgement and pressed her lips together carefully to prevent the words from escaping.

"Go ahead, Sara, say it," was Megan's dry comment. "I dare say I deserved it. I'm not sorry to pry, but I am sorry that it pains you."

"Water under the bridge," Sara replied with forced ease.

"Hmmm."

Another few moments of silence followed, and then Megan leaned over to snag her dark red suitcase as it came by, lifting up and over with a graceful gesture.

"I am somehow not surprised that you have red luggage," Sara commented, picking up the suitcase before the other woman could shift her carry-on to grab it. A subject change was in order, or it would be a long ride to the hotel.

The serologist laughed. "I am the job, and the job is me, as they say? And I'm not yet so far advanced in age that I can't carry my own bag."

"No, you're not," Sara agreed, but didn't relinquish her hold on the bag. "Is that yours, too?" she asked, pointing to the red garment bag coming by at that instant. At Megan's affirmative, she reached over and pulled it out, hefting it over her shoulder and picking up the suitcase with her other arm. "I've got my car parked in the garage. Would you rather go straight to the hotel or to the labs?"

Megan raised a chastising eyebrow. "You have to ask?"

* * *

"Megan!" Carl leaned over to give a few last-minute instructions to Carrie, the day shift DNA analyst, and came forward to shake Megan's hand and kiss her on the cheek warmly. "It's been years."

"Far too long," Megan returned with an answering smile. "How are Julia and the children? Robbie must be what - in high school by now?"

"He graduates next year," Carl said proudly. "He's looking at Bowdoin. And Lizzie starts high school next year."

"Time flies," Megan murmured, shaking her head with a half-smile. "You have a good setup here," she commented, looking into the DNA lab and through the glass walls to the labs beyond.

"We hope to crack the top five next year. I'd love to show you around - " His pager chose that instant to go off, and he read its message with a frown " - but it looks like I've got a crime scene waiting for me. Home invasion in the Back Bay. Maybe Sara..."

"Go," Megan waved him off, "I can explore by myself. I wouldn't want to keep Sara awake any longer than she already has been."

"Hm?" Sara snapped back to attention; she had backed off to a discreet distance to let the old friends converse and had been mentally cataloguing her to do list over the last few days before the colloquium. "I'm sorry, I was out of it for a second there."

"Go home. Sleep," was Carl's order. "I'm heading to the Back Bay. Megan, good to see you again. Thomas is in on overtime today; be sure to stop by his office and say hello. We'll catch a bite to eat later..." His paper sounded again, shrilly. "...and I really have to go. Bye!" He waved over his shoulder as he took off down the hallway.

"Carl's right, you should go home," Megan said, turning on Sara, who had leaned cross-armed against the wall. "How long has it been since you've slept?"

"A while," Sara replied vaguely. "I'm fine. Where do you want to start?"

Before Megan could answer, one of the day shift CSIs passed the two women and did a double take. "Sara?" Kevin asked, looking at her with narrowed eyes. "You just come from Logan?"

"Yes..." Sara replied, confused. "I picked Dr. Coriander up."

"That's...weird..." Kevin said slowly. "Carl just had me pick someone for the conference up because he said you were home sleeping and he didn't want to bother you."

Sara spread her hands apart and shrugged; there was really no way she could answer that beyond the obvious, that it didn't really make sense but it was done now.

"Huh." Kevin furrowed his forehead, and then shook his head quickly, as if to clear it of the misleading thoughts. "Whatever. Miscommunication or something. I'll see you around."

"Yeah," Sara agreed, slightly uneasy for some reason. "See ya."

* * *

Thomas's door was closed when they arrived, and they could hear his muffled voice from where they stood in the hallway. Sara shrugged. "He's with someone, I guess. I'll take you through the lab a bit more and we'll come back later. You should see our chop shop - it's huge!"

Megan shook her head at the younger CSI. "Only you, Sara. Only you."

"I happen to _like_ the automotive work," Sara snarked back, and took a few steps in the direction of the CSI garage before the door to Thomas's office opened.

"Sara! Megan!" Thomas stood in the doorway and beamed. "You were just going to walk by?"

"You were with someone," Sara told him while Megan launched herself into Thomas's arms for a hug. "We were going to come back later."

"Nonsense," Thomas said. "Just an old friend, in town for the conference. We were nearly finished." Releasing Megan, he returned to his office and picked up the phone. "I'll call Kevin to have him bring you to your hotel," he told whoever was sitting across the desk from him; the doorway obscured Sara's view.

Megan pushed the door open further to enter the office first, and Sara followed - bumping her nose hard against Megan's back when the other woman stopped abruptly. "Ow, Megan, what are you - "

The door finished its swing, and Sara got a clear glimpse of the other man in the office.

"Grissom," she breathed.


	6. Chapter 5

He was talking - or at least, she thought he was talking. His lips were moving, but he could have been yelling for all she knew. Her ears seemed to have short-circuited, leaving nothing but white noise to make it through to her brain, a roaring that made her dizzy and more than slightly nauseated.

Sara stammered her apologies to Megan and Thomas and turned, somehow managing not to trip as she very carefully put one foot in front of the other and walked back down the hall. Every step was a small victory, as she shed herself of the shock and collected her thoughts into coherent order. And with every step she grew angrier.

Carl. Carl and Thomas. She was going to kill them both. She could get away with it, too. Stupid, stupid mistake to piss off the lab's top CSI. Suicidal, really.

Sara jabbed the cell phone keypad with her finger, and was about to press send for speed dial when she stopped in the middle of the hallway and closed the phone back up.

God. Oh, God. Her anger suddenly evaporated, leaving her dizzy and sick again. She sagged against the wall, hitting her shoulder hard on the metal frame of the glass surrounding one of the labs, and pressed a shaking hand to her lips and then her forehead.

_Get ahold of yourself, Sidle,_ she ordered herself firmly. The list of reasons she shouldn't fall apart just from seeing Gil Grissom was a long and persuasive one, topped by the fact that she had already dealt with this. Sara never went over the same ground twice. It was what had always made her such a good scientist. In Chem 101, first day of class, the professor had walked in and written a quote from Einstein on the white board in front of an ampitheater of several hundred terrified Harvard freshmen.

_"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,"_ he'd scrawled, and Sara had dutifully copied it down on the inside cover of her lab notebook. Later, she'd typed it out and stuck it to the corkboard that hung over her desk. Creativity was the root of scientific discovery. Try things that hadn't been done before, and you arrived at the answers that were exactly the ones you needed because you'd finally learned to ask the right questions.

Expect the unexpected.

Her thoughts completed the tangent and her mind finally achieved something approaching equilibrium.

Okay. This was unexpected. Out of left field. A radical departure from the normal operating parameters.

She could deal with it. First step - isolate the mutation. That meant not letting it control the rest of the equation, rejecting its influence and normalizing conditions.

Sara stood up straight again and ignored the twinge in pain from what would surely be a rather impressive bruise on her shoulder. Deep breath in, deep breath out. One foot in front of the other, all the way out to the parking garage and her car and her appartment and her bed and when she woke up there was the routine that would snap back in place. Beyond that, she could deal with anything.

"Sara."

No. No, no, no.

She kept walking.

"_Sara_."

Ignore the little huff of self-frustation that you know so well. Ignore the sixth sense that tells you exactly how he's standing, shoulders hunched, hands in pockets, face blank, eyes reflecting the inner struggle as he tries to find just the right words even though he never does.

"She was my daughter too."

Sara stopped, every muscle in her body locking abruptly. No. _No_.

She started walking again, and didn't break into a run until she'd left the building.

~*~

The phone ringing shook her out of the nightmare, and Sara breathed heavily for a few minutes, sweat dampening the flannel sheets, before she squinted at the alarm clock and wondered why the hell anyone was calling her at two in the afternoon. She'd only been asleep for an hour.

For a long, irrational moment she didn't want to answer it. There was the chance it might be Grissom, and after the nightmare she'd just had, she wasn't in any shape to face him.

Then she realized how cowardly those thoughts sounded, and nearly knocked the phone off her nightstand as she slapped her hand down on it.

"Gr - Sidle," she snapped, not caring how groggy she sounded and blaming her abrupt wakening for the slip in answering.

"Sar?"

The voice on the other end of the line was one of the few guaranteed to make her smile instantly, given that Carl and Thomas were, knowingly or not, operating under death threats. "Nicky."

"Um, listen, I just wanted to warn you that - "

"I've already seen him," she sighed, untangling herself from the sweaty covers and sliding into a bathrobe. No way was she going to be able to sleep.

"Oh, God, Sar, I'm sorry, we didn't know, Cath was the only one who knew, and she didn't say anything until this morning when we were asking why he took a personal day, and..." His words jumbled together, coming out faster and faster until he finally ran out of explanation. "I'm so sorry."

She shrugged before realizing he couldn't see the gesture, and cleared her throat. "It's not your fault."

He would blame himself anyway. Nick Stokes had always played the role of her older brother, and over those months, he had given the word 'protective' new meaning. It had set him at odds with Catherine and Warrick, but he had never faltered, never failed her.

"Catherine didn't say anything," he reiterated, and now he was working himself into the kind of fury she well remembered. "She knew. She's known for a few days. I think she told Warrick. I don't get it. I don't know why he went."

Sara did. "A few days, like since the weekend?" She folded her legs underneath her as she nestled in the chair and looked out the window. Sometime since she'd gone to bed, snow had begun to fall, lazily, beautifully.

"Sure. I don't know." He paused, obviously going over the events of the past few days and picking out clues among words and events that had seemed innocuous at the time, using his investigator's mind to form a more complete picture. "Yeah. Since the weekend."

"I Fed-Exed the divorce papers this weekend. And my resignation," she added almost as an afterthought.

There was complete silence on the other end, and Sara focused on one flake at a time as they drifted down and settled in her window box, covering the frozen dirt.

Nick finally drew in a shuddering breath. "God."

"Yeah."

They sat in quiet for a few moments, and Sara closed her eyes, unwilling to be hypnotized by the snow. "It's not like it wasn't inevitable."

She could practically hear him struggling for words on the other end, and she knew if they weren't separated by three thousand miles and three hours of time difference, he would have pulled her into a tight hug. Knowing that made her smile, at least a little bit.

"Do you remember my last night in Vegas?" she asked him, opening her eyes to watch the snow again. It had picked up, falling thicker and faster, and her view of the Boston skyline was becoming blurry.

"Yeah," Nick confirmed, obviously unsure where she was leading with this line of questioning.

"You bought me ice cream," she reminisced, and the slight smile grew wider, "and we walked down the Strip. And we ended up in that little Italian place."

"Puccini's," he continued. "Wine and bread sticks."

"Do you remember what I asked you?" Her voice was almost dreamy. The snow had reached whiteout conditions, and she couldn't take her eyes off the swirling mass, interrupted only briefly by the dark of buildings and gray sky.

"You..." He cleared his throat. "You asked why we'd never ended up together."

"It wasn't a very fair thing to ask," Sara said absently, and the snow kept falling.

"You'd had...a little too much to drink." Nick sighed lightly. "You weren't yourself."

"I haven't been myself for months," she snapped back, more of an edge to her voice than she'd intended. "I'm...sorry. You didn't deserve that." Before he could tell her it was okay, she spoke again. "You never answered me, you know."

"No, I didn't."

"Well?"

"Sara..." His voice nearly trembled with emotion, gentle, upright Nick Stokes, the best man she knew. "It wouldn't have...you were always...I was..."

The snow was still coming down, and while the view from the window was one big blur, she knew she was crying when the frame of the window began to smudge and bleed into the white of the panorama beyond.

"Yeah. I know."


	7. Chapter 6

Sara was lost in the memory of that last night in Vegas while Carl spoke at the head of the oval meeting table. She hadn't quite forgiven him, but then again, she hadn't really talked to him either. He'd asked her briefly if she was okay, and she'd blown him off with the traditional answer. She had contented herself in the knowledge that he didn't have the whole story, and that he was never a purposefully malicious man.

He was talking about luncheon menus, but Sara was remembering Nick's strong arm holding her up as they crossed the threshold into the dark of the small townhouse. She'd banged her knee on her suitcase where it sat by the doorway, and had giggled until the pain made itself known through the slight haze. He'd plied her with coffee and a muffin and she'd already begun to sober up a half an hour later when he left her watching the Discovery Channel, kissing her on the top of her head and fighting back tears as he said goodbye.

It was a red-eye flight, four am, which meant she asked the taxi to pick her up at two am. Nick had left a little after eleven, and she'd finally given in and called Grissom's cell phone at one am.

Catherine had answered, and had hung up when she heard Sara's voice.

Sara had called the cab company and asked them to pick her up an hour early.

~*~

"I told Kim that I'd run into you," Ken told her as he taped the poster to the door of room 219.

Sara snorted. "Does she know we..."

"She knows we used to date," he said, giving her the dazzling grin that had made him the catch of the campus.

"Ah." Despite herself, Sara smiled in response. "Probably safest that you keep it at that."

"Probably," Ken agreed, tearing off one last piece of masking tape and tamping down another corner. "Next?"

She slid the next room schedule out of the folder. "That would be room 312, the one with the ventilation system?"

"Oh, yeah," he said in remembrance, and led the way to the stairwell. "Do I...really want to know?"

"Decomposition stages," she told him succinctly, and he turned green.

"Yeah. I didn't. You ever wish you'd stayed in the academic world? I can tell you right now I have never had to determine the decomposition stage of anything, unless you're counting molecular half-life as a decomposition." Their footsteps echoed in the empty hallway as they exited the stairwell and continued toward room 312.

"Never," Sara said definitively, and opened the door to the room, crossing to the instructor's lab table and setting out the basic information packet and day's schedule. "Forensics is applied science. And you get to really make a difference. I wouldn't trade it for the world."

Ken looked at her admiringly. "Huh. Good for you, Sara."

She blushed slightly and ducked past him and out the door. He followed her and ripped off another piece of tape as she held the room schedule against the glass. "So what did Kim think about us working together?"

He snorted. "Actually, she wants you to come by for dinner. I think she wants to show off Jennifer and Mallory."

Sara's insides congealed, but she forced herself to keep her tone light. "Somehow I don't think we have the same dinner hours." Given how little she slept, they probably did, but he didn't need to know that and she didn't need to put herself through Kim Fuller showing off her bouncing, healthy baby.

Ken shrugged, and then frowned as he focused his eyes on something over her shoulder. "Can I help you?"

Sara turned to see who it was, and then it was her turn to frown. "The seminars don't start until tomorrow morning."

"I'm not looking for the seminars," Grissom answered, shifting uncomfortably.

"This isn't exactly a tourist venue," she snapped back, and regretted it instantly. Whatever else had passed between them, there was no reason for her to be deliberately cruel.

"Sara?" Ken rested his hand on her shoulder. She jerked out from underneath his fingers.

"Ken, this is Dr. Gil Grissom. He's an entomologist," Sara explained, pointing between the two men with quick gestures. "Dr. Grissom, Dr. Ken Fuller. He's with the chemistry faculty and has been Boston CSI's liaison for the colloquium."

"Dr. Grissom," Ken said, extending his hand gallantly. Harvard didn't hire idiots. He had recognized the name immediately and every inch of his posture screamed defensive.

In its own subtle way, so did Grissom's. The man had a mind like a steel trap, and there wasn't a doubt in Sara's mind about whether or not he had recognized the name Ken Fuller.

_Simpler, sweeter times,_ she thought wistfully, remembering the lighthearted flirting with only a slight twinge of pain.

Grissom's hands remained in his jacket pockets, and Ken pulled his hand back, disconcerted.

"We should go check and see if the ampitheater downstairs is empty yet," Sara told Ken, keeping her eyes carefully away from Grissom. "And then I have to get home."

"Sure." Ken looked at Grissom one last time. "Yeah."

She made the mistake of looking back. She always had. Lot's wife had nothing on her.

He looked so heartbreakingly lost, standing in the darkened hallway, that she doubled her pace and swallowed hard against the tears.

~*~

"Sara." Megan clasped her hand warmly and dusted a kiss on her cheek. "You were wonderful this afternoon."

"Really?" Sara tucked her hair behind her ear and smiled nervously. "I was so afraid I was going to get up in front of the entire auditorium of forensic scientists and just choke."

"You didn't. I could sit here all evening and feed your ego by telling you how well you did, but I suspect that would bore both of us." Instead, Megan snagged two flutes of champagne from a roving waiter as he passed by and handed one of them to Sara. "To the first annual Boston Forensic Science Conference," she said, tapping the rim of her glass against Sara's.

"Annual," Sara repeated with a mock-groan. "You keep talking like that and I'm going to need more of this." She sipped the straw-colored fluid delicately and while she was well aware of the time it would take for the alcohol to circulate through her bloodstream and reach her brain, and of the near-impossibility of one sip of champagne of impairing her judgement - she still felt as if the bubbles had gone straight to her head. It was probably the relief at the fact that she hadn't botched the opening address.

Megan laughed and obliged, gesturing for the waiter that had just passed them to come back. Sara downed the last of the liquid and set her empty glass on his tray, taking a full one in return.

"You're trying to get me drunk," Sara accused the serologist, running the numbers in her head. Champagne was 12% alcohol by volume, she weighed just over 100 pounds...Megan wouldn't have to try very hard.

"Sara Sidle, I would never," the other woman protested.

"The evidence says otherwise," Sara rebuked, and held up the half-empty glass. "And the evidence..."

"Never lies," he said quietly from behind her, and Sara jumped and nearly spilled the champagne down the front of her new evening dress. "You look beautiful, Sara."

Sara bit her tongue on returning the compliment, however true it might have been. As she could remember all too clearly, when Grissom cleaned up, he was a strikingly good-looking man. The sad, gentle smile on his lips tugged at her before the rest of the memories filled in and she tore her eyes away from him, ducking her head and furious at herself for the sting of tears.

"Gil, I assume you were at the welcoming address this afternoon?" Megan asked in an overly-bright voice.

"I was," he answered, and there was a few seconds' silence before Megan realized he wasn't going to offer any more information than that.

Sara studied the way her fingers were stretched along the champagne glass, pale white digits against the gold of the champagne, bubbles clinging to the inside of the glass. Grissom was looking at her like he didn't already know every inch of her body, and that made her even more nervous than the roomful of world-class forensic scientists had earlier.

Thomas's fingers on her shoulder made her jump for the second time in five minutes, and she ground her teeth in frustration. "You should know better than to sneak up on me like that," she chastised him, glad to escape the oppressiveness of the moment.

"My apologies," he said smoothly, and captured her free hand to bring it to his lips with a quirk of a smile. "You look stunning, Sara." The slight smile became an unrepentant grin. "And you outshine everyone here this evening, much to Maggie's chagrin."

Sara laughed, answering his grin with a gap-toothed smile of her own. Somehow, Thomas could always charm her into a better mood.

"With the possible exception of you, of course, Megan," Thomas amended, spreading an arm in a courtly half-bow toward the older woman, who responded with a snort.

"Honesty will get you much further than flattery, you old cad. Sara is the most beautiful woman in the room tonight, and we both know it." Megan jabbed her finger in Thomas's direction with a light scowl on her face. "And Sara, stop blushing and learn to take a compliment."

"It was Marianne and Julia," Sara evaded. "They're really the ones who...they were a big help."

"I should remember to thank them," Grissom murmured, the blood rushed to Sara's cheeks again, though whether from embarassment, anger, or just high emotion, she had no idea.

From a corner across the room, the small band played a few invitational bars, and couples began to migrate to the dance floor.

"May I have this dance?" Thomas asked, crooking his arm out for Megan. She accepted with a smile, taking a moment to set down her champagne flute down on a table before they reached the dance floor.

_No, no, no..._

"Sara?" Grissom somehow managed to infuse her name with a world of question, of trepidation, of longing, of love, and of hope.

She trembled, and remembered all too clearly the last time they had danced - the wedding reception. Juxtaposing the two occasions was an exercise in heartbreak.

She blamed it on the champagne when her body reacted against her better judgement, and it was as if the last six months hadn't happened when her hand slid easily into his, her stride matched his as they walked to the dance floor.

The song was unfamiliar, but Sara had the feeling Grissom would recognize it and be able to give her chapter and verse on its origins. Opening her mouth to ask him would start a conversation, which would lead to words that accomplished nothing but more pain. So she stayed quiet, content with knowing only that the words to the song talked of distance and heartache.

She started out determined to make the dance a formality and nothing more, holding herself stiffly apart from him. But his warmth radiated out through the thin silk of her dress, and his hand was pressed flat against the small of her back - bare from the plunging cut of the dress. It made her think of the dozens of other times his fingers had trailed her skin, and when she shivered from the memories, it only brought her closer, until her cheek was just barely touching the rough material of his coat where it grazed his shoulder.

Neither spoke. Sara was afraid to break the quiet reflection of the moment, and Grissom...she'd never been able to figure out what was going on in his head. She had been married to him for almost a year, and still she couldn't pretend to understand him in the slightest. 

The song ended far too quickly, and Grissom reached up to cup her chin with his hand, his thumb running gently along her cheekbone.

"Sara..." he began, and she wondered for a moment if he would ever progress past repeating her name.

"Don't, Grissom," she responded quietly, reaching up with her hand to cover his briefly, then tugging his fingers away from her cheek. "Don't ruin the only thing we ever did well."


	8. Chapter 7

"Sara, Alec, missing person at Boston City Hospital." Thomas slid the slip across the table. "Sara's primary."

"How do you lose someone from a hospital?" Alec asked incredulously.

"Maternity ward," Sara whispered, the words blurring in front of her eyes. "Gregory Itzin, age...forty-eight hours."

"Oh, God," Jonas whispered, and Sara looked up to see Thomas studying her intently.

She stood, almost knocking the chair backward. "All right. Let's go."

~*~

"Did anyone touch the bassinet?" Sara asked, shining her flashlight at the plastic cradle, illuminating its corner of the hospital basement.

"Yes - Kara did, and I did." Jane Henderson, the maternity nurse, hugged her sides tightly against the chill of the cellar. Scrubs weren't made for warmth, only for comfort and ease of movement. "Kara, she's the one who found it. She's in high school, she volunteers here as a candy striper. She was putting the old flower cart with the other broken carts, and she saw it in the corner there."

Sara's flashlight tracked left to shine on the plaque that read "Morgue" with an arrow under it, and then back to the right. "You just leave them there?"

The nurse shrugged. "Yes. Sometimes we're able to cannabalize old ones for parts. We're on a strict budget."

"I know the feeling," Sara murmured in response, thinking of how hard Thomas had fought to replace the GC/MS last month. "All right. I should be fine down here; have you given your statement yet?"

The nurse nodded yes while Kara shook her head no. "Then Kara, you're going to go with Officer Staniwicz and he's just going to have you describe how you found it. First, though, I'm just going to need to take your fingerprints."

The girl, a slightly overweight teenager, jerked her chin up and narrowed her eyes in confusion. "But I didn't do anything."

"This is just to prove that. I'm going to dust for fingerprints and I need a way to eliminate yours from the others I'm going to find. Mrs. Henderson, I'm going to need yours too." Sara set her kit down on a hospital stretcher stripped of its wheels. "I think you can turn the lights on...Officer?"

Staniwicz nodded from where he stood near the elevator doors and reached across to hit the light switches. Sara turned off her flashlight when the room flooded with light - or as much light as the bare bulbs could project into the furthest musty corners. Taking comfort in the standard movements, she took her fingerprinting materials out and set the ten-cards out on the stretcher, walking first Jane and then Kara through the process and answering a few of their questions. It was a basic exercise, one she had gone through hundreds of times, and it served to return her thoughts to the orderly precision they needed to be on a crime scene.

"You're all set," Sara told Kara with a reassuring smile. Jane had left as soon as the fingerprinting was done, hurrying back to the maternity ward. "Just remember to talk to Officer Staniwicz."

The teenager offered her a shy smile as she washed the last of the ink off using the wet wipe Sara had offered her, and then turned to leave.

Sara was already unpacking more items from her kit and laying them out on the stretcher. She knelt down and confirmed what she'd suspected - the floor was filthy, and gritty; not enough dirt to hold a shoeprint, but just enough to interfere with any attempt she might make to lift treads electro-statically. There were a few smudges made when someone had braced him or herself to shift the carts - the bassinet had been shoved far into the corner - but they could have belonged to either the kidnapper or Jane or Kara trying to get to the corner.

With that in mind, Sara uncapped the fingerprinting powder and began to dust the metallic surfaces of the carts that had been disturbed to reach the bassinet. Depending on how long the junk had been down there, she could be lifting ancient prints, but anything she gathered could add weight to a circumstantial case.

Twenty minutes later, she reached the bassinet, and she tucked the brush and jar into her vest for now; she didn't want the fingerprinting powder interfering with any trace she might pick up.

The sheets were blue; the hospital's way of identifying at a glance that the infant swaddled in them had been a boy. There had once been a blanket, as well, but it had disappeared along with the baby. The remaining light sheet was crumpled in a ball - a ball that looked far too big to be just the scrap of fabric that was required to cover a day old infant.

Sara photographed, changed the angle, and photographed again, finally setting down the camera to reach into the bassinet and slowly unravel the wadded blanket. Wrapped in the blanket were a pair of scrubs; plain and pale yellow, stiffly new. Painstakingly, she went over the fabric inch by inch as she straightened it out, searching for hair or fiber. Nothing jumped out at her, but she backed up a few feet and grabbed some paper evidence bags, separating the sheet from the scrubs and marking off all the necessary information. She could examine it more closely at the lab, and swab for epithelials.

When she separated the shirt from the pants, a scrap of blue plastic fell out - the baby's wristband. Sara picked it up and felt tears sting the corners of her eyelids. Angrily, she rubbed at her eyes with a corner of her sleeve. "Dammit," she whispered as she dropped the wristband into an evidence bag. Somewhere upstairs was a mother with a matching band on her wrist who might never see her baby again.

And that line of thinking was going to get her into nothing but trouble. Sara returned the evidence bags to the stretcher and dusted the bassinet for prints, lifting several clear fingers and palms and even more partials.

"Hey, Sara?"

She nearly dropped the powder-laden brush into the bassinet. "Dammit, Staniwicz, you scared me half to death."

The detective spread his hands wide. "Sorry. Anyway, if you're done down here, they're looking for you upstairs."

Sara gave the basement corner one last look-over, and nodded absently in acknowledgement as she repacked her kit. "I am. It will need to stay sealed, though." She ducked back under the yellow tape.

Staniwicz shifted nervously. "So...um...what do you think our chances are?"

"With missing persons, it's the first forty-eight hours that are crucial," Sara said, as if by rote. "But that's in a situation where you assume your missing person is able to act, to affect the situation they're in. An infant?" She pressed her lips to a thin line and shook her head slightly. 

"Bastards," Staniwicz spat out.

He was still young. He would learn.

She hated herself for thinking that.

"Upstairs, you said?"

~*~

"I didn't get much up here," Alec said, gesturing with the latex glove he had just pulled off. "The sign-out log indicates that Gregory was taken to his mother at approximately ten-thirty pm. They tell me that's just before shift change. Thing is, they're not really sure who went to pick the baby up. They don't note who it was until they get the baby back to the nursery."

Sara wrapped her arms around herself and stared into the nursery without really seeing anything, trying very hard not to focus on the rows of tiny sleeping babies.

"So what it looks like happened is, someone brought the baby to her mother at ten-thirty, and then whoever went to pick up the baby just...didn't come back. Brought the bassinet down to the basement, and then just walked out. Probably through the emergency room; there were several accidents right in a row, and it was busy down there." He was reading from his notes, written in perfect shorthand, carefully bulleted. Sara eyed the steno pad and wondered how he hadn't even dented the corners of the cardboard cover.

"Inside job," she observed softly, stating the obvious, dropping her hands to her sides and curling her fingers into fists.

"Looks like." Alec returned the steno pad to his evidence kit and folded his arms. "They look so peaceful," he commented, and Sara looked at him sideways, surprised by the observation - and that it was her he would choose to make it to.

"Yeah," she breathed softly, remembering the feel of soft, downy skin against her cheek and suddenly finding it hard to breathe.

"Sara...Sara?"

Alec was shaking her shoulder, and she furrowed her brow and looked up at him before the pain caught her attention. Her hands were bleeding, tiny crescent-shaped cuts from her fingernails. She stared down at the red blood against the pale skin and blinked, uncomprehending.

"Are you okay?"

She shook herself, and looked up at Alec's worried face. Alec. Worried. Not good. "Yes," she answered simply, flattening her fingers out and covering the blood on her hands. "Have you talked to the mother yet?"

He shook his head. "Not yet. Would you like me to..."

"I'll do it," she snapped, more harshly than she'd intended, but the idea of Alec worrying about her in any way grated on her. They'd been competing for too long to revert to friendship. It was safer, in a sense, when they were enemies.

She rocked backwards on her feet to give herself the momentum to leave the nursery and didn't examine her hands more closely until she'd rounded the corner. The cuts weren't deep, but they were bleeding freely, and they stung.

There was a public bathroom just to her right, and she leaned into the swinging doorway, careful not to touch anything. The water and soap stung, and she hissed out through her teeth in frustration. The fact that she was in a hospital and could get the cuts taken care of in a much more hygienic manner was not lost on her as she dabbed away the soapy blood and crumbled the cheap brown paper towel into a tight wad.

The maternity ward rooms weren't far from the nursery, and it was easy to tell from the officers standing outside the door which room belonged to the mother - Monica Itzin.

Sara had not expected her to be barely sixteen.

She looked like she'd cried some hours ago, eyes red-rimmed but on the mend. The female officer by the bed was talking to her in a low voice, but she wasn't paying attention, staring out the window. Her dark hair was spread across the white pillow, and she was thin - her body seemed to barely make a lump in the sheets.

Sara leaned against the doorway, both hands on the handle of the evidence kit.

Monica turned her head to look at Sara. She had beautiful dove gray eyes, almond-shaped and set above flawless cheekbones. Had she passed that facial structure on to her son?

Or had his eyes come from his father?

_Beautiful, clear, blue eyes..._

No.

"Hey," Sara said, the word coming out cracked and harsh. She cleared her throat and tried again. "I'm ah, I'm with the Crime Lab. I just need to ask you a few questions." Monica nodded slowly, and Sara took that as an invitation to come over and sit down on the rolling stool by the bed. "About what time did the nurse come back to...to pick up Gregory?"

"Around eleven o'clock," Monica replied, so quietly Sara almost had to lean over to hear her. 

"Okay," Sara said, nodding. "Did she touch anything in the room?"

Monica shook her head slowly, side to side, but didn't vocalize her answer.

"We've got a working composite sketch," Officer Linda Nevins said quietly from across the bed. 

Sara nodded again. "Do you remember what she was wearing?"

"The same thing as all the other nurses."

"Scrubs?"

Monica shrugged.

"Do you remember what color they were?"

"Yellow. Light yellow," the girl murmured.

"Was it someone you had seen before?"

"I don't know. Maybe. I don't really remember. I was tired." Her voice was petulant, childish, and she made a moue of frustration. "I'm still tired."

"Okay." Sara reached down for the fingerprinting equipment. "I'm just going to need to take your fingerprints, so I can narrow down the fingerprints I took from the bassinet." She set the ten-card on the bed and rolled Monica's ice-cold fingers in the ink, pressing them firmly onto the thin cardboard. "If you remember anything else..."

"Yeah, they gave me their cards. Plus, they're here, like, all the time anyway." The beautiful gray eyes narrowed in anger, and Sara tried to give the girl the benefit of the doubt. She'd probably just gone through the hardest day of her life.

"Thank you for your help," Sara said, and managed to keep the sarcasm out of her voice, suddenly frustrated by Monica's reactions. Irrational, she knew - what had she expected? Why had she expected anything? - but still, affecting the way she was dealing with the young mother.

Linda caught her as she was leaving the room. "She's had a rough day. We can't even imagine - "

"Yes. We can," Sara said coldly, shrugging off the officer's arm while a voice in the back of her mind screamed at her to reach some sort of emotional equilibrium with this case - if she kept swinging between extremes like this, it would destroy her.

She left Officer Nevins standing in the doorway, staring after her.


	9. Chapter 8

There was really only one person who would be knocking on her door, but that didn't stop Sara from checking.

Grissom stared right back at her, obviously focused on the Judas hole from the other side.

She rested her forehead against the cool wood and closed her eyes.

"Sara, let me in."

Too late. He'd seen her shadow through the hole.

"I know you're there."

The door vibrated slightly - he must have leaned against it from his side.

"Sara...please."

She slid down to the floor, legs splayed out, cheek and right shoulder rested against the door. "What do you want?"

"To talk." Grissom, saying please. Grissom, wanting to talk. She wished it had come about any other way.

"It's too late, Grissom."

He was silent for a long time, and she couldn't decide whether or not she hoped he had left.

"I don't..." He paused, as if he was regrouping. "I don't want it to be too late."

The simplicity, the near-childishness of the statement made her catch her breath.

"Sara, please let me in."

"I don't think that would be a good idea, Griss," she confessed.

"_Sara_."

"What would talking accomplish?" she asked angrily, fisting her hand against the door, the barely-healed scabs in her palms making themselves known through pain. "It didn't work out, Grissom. We never should have gotten married."

"I love you," he offered up, and she screwed her eyes shut even harder.

"Love isn't always enough," she whispered back.

He was quiet for a long time, and she stood and opened the door.

He was gone.

~*~

Someone's hand was on her shoulder, rocking her slightly. Sara knitted her eyebrows together in confusion, and then cracked an eyelid. The wall of the break room. Sideways.

Huh?

"Good morning," Jonas said simply, and pushed the mug of coffee across the table at her.

Sara groaned and rubbed at the side of her face, numb from where it had rested on the plastic of the break room table. "Thank you," she said sincerely, sliding her fingers through the mug handle and bringing the hot liquid to her lips. She paused halfway through setting it back down, a frown on her lips.

"I was waiting for - oh, shit, the DNA results," she yelped, and unclipped her pager from her belt while struggling to her feet. Four messages - all from the DNA lab, the last sent nearly an hour ago. It was six in the morning. She'd slept for an hour and a half.

Jonas didn't say anything, but slid a manila folder across the table with a slight smile on his lips. Sara looked at the label and breathed in relief. "You're amazing, you know that, right?"

The other CSI shrugged, a shy smile on his face. "You needed your sleep, and there was nothing pressing. Thomas told me to let you sleep."

"Thomas?" Sara could feel a headache coming on. She took a gulp of the hot coffee, and part of her noted that it was heavily sugared - Jonas might have been the most reclusive of the night shift CSIs, but he was observant and sensitive, and he'd taken the time to make the coffee exactly the way she liked it.

Jonas shrugged. "You've been working so hard for the conference." He paused, obviously unsure about whether to continue or not. "And with Dr. Grissom here, uhm...you know what, I'm sorry. It's none of my business."

She couldn't help but smile. "Don't be sorry. I'm dealing with it." That was...a lie. A white lie, but a lie nonetheless. She hadn't told him how she was dealing with it. He hadn't asked. They would leave it at that and go home to their separate lives, and work was more comfortable for it.

Jonas nodded, apparently satisfied with her answer. "So...did you find what you were hoping for?"

Damn Grissom, anyway. She'd completely forgottten the report under her fingertips. "Oh - uhm, let's see..." She'd retrieved several skin samples from the scrubs found in the bassinet, as well as saliva from the baby's wristband.

"The skin from the scrubs came back unknown," she said aloud for Jonas's benefit. "And the saliva from the wristband matched six markers to Monica Itzin." That confirmed her suspicions that baby Gregory had slobbered a bit on the plastic. The image that brought to her mind gave her a bittersweet pang, and she closed the folder quickly just as her pager sounded. "Fingerprinting."

"Wow," Jonas said with a half-smile, trying to lighten the mood. "They must like you. I've been waiting on a confirmation from my first case of the night since midnight. Tell me, what's your secret?"

Sara smirked and tapped him on the head with the folder in chastisement, then swallowed the rest of the coffee and put the mug in the sink. "I don't give them the contents of a victim's entire purse to print."

"I was being _thorough_," Jonas mock-whined, and Sara rolled her eyes at him before exiting the break room.

~*~

Sara had no illusions about just how big a mistake she was making by slipping into a chair in the back of the room. Fortunately, it was the large ampitheater, and the back row was not only at least thirty yards back from the lecturer's podium, it was the darkest part of the room when the lights were dimmed to show slides.

It hadn't been in this exact room, but one very like it, that she'd first heard Grissom speak about entomology. She'd sat in the front row, then, full of the curiosity and more than her fair share of arrogance. He had matched her, answer for question, and for a time it had seemed like they were the only two people in the auditorium.

He still had that spark about him, that intensity of mind that made him one of the most respected scientists in his field in the country. Forensics was the only subject he'd ever been able to converse freely on, and it was as if he'd saved all his communication skills just for that. The several dozen forensics specialists remained completely silent as he talked about linear regression, maturation stages, and habitat placement. He had them in the palm of his hand, and he was almost completely oblivious to that fact.

Sara remembered his voice, muffled through the wood of her apartment door, telling her he loved her. 

She knew she had been right, because the problem never had been that they didn't love each other enough. If anything, they had loved each other too much. Weakness and a need to mutually affirm their place among the living after a particulary difficult case had led them into each other's arms, and it had been a mistake to think that they could just carry on as before.

But somehow they had, for almost a month. Sara didn't remember those weeks too clearly; they were a blur of heightened awareness and cold showers and the occasional tears of frustration.

What she did recall with crystal clarity was the chilled porcelain of the sink against her cheek as she lay slumped on the floor of her bathroom, the home pregnancy test in her hand reading positive.

Her pager vibrated against her side, and she folded her body in the seat to look down at it without unclipping it. Kevin, who was acting as supervisor when Carl was attending various panels. No message; just to call him back.

It wasn't marked urgent, so she waited the last few minutes and exited discreetly with the small group that chose to leave before the open discussion portion of the lecture. Once in the hall, she opened her cell phone and dialed the number Kevin had left her while walking out to her car and sliding on her sunglasses.


	10. Chapter 9

"Sorry I'm late," Alec chuffed, clapping his hands together, his breath pluming white in the icy cold of Boston in January. "What's up?"

Sara shrugged, her mouth and nose buried in her scarf. She lifted her head briefly to respond. "I only just got here." He had caught her, in fact, walking in the direction of the police tape that cordoned off the alley. Having spoken, she tucked her neck in again and was immediately grateful for the insulation of her scarf.

"Right." He matched her stride for stride as they walked quickly to better warm up. "We're not far from Boston City Hospital, are we?"

She narrowed her eyes in thought, visualizing the maze of Boston's streets. "Two or three blocks over..." Her steps grew faster, and she ducked under the crime scene tape, heading straight for the dumpster the police officers were crowded around.

"CSI. Let me through." She didn't bother to wait for their responses, and shouldered her way through the crowd.

The scarf was suddenly too restricting, and she tore it away from her mouth to breathe. Her lungs seemed to immediately catch on fire as the icy cold raced into her lungs.

Gregory Itzin had been a beautiful baby, and she had her answer - his eyes were gray, like his mother's.

Alec was silent beside her, and she pressed her gloved hand tightly against her mouth, trying to stall the nausea that was rising. No child's skin should be that color, that pale blue from frostbite. No child should be encased in a plastic bag and thrown in a dumpster, either.

Sara lost the fight, and staggered away, shoving through the police officers to lean heavily against the brick wall of the opposite building. A last minute presence of mind kept her from actually throwing up, and instead she heaved dryly, the bile burning the back of her throat and the tears nearly freezing on her cheeks.

Someone's hand was on her back, and she jerked backward, spinning around to press her back up against the wall.

Alec was looking at her with something approaching fear in his eyes. "Are you okay?"

"Why are you being so nice to me?" she snapped. Anger was good - anger was easier. It kept away the other thoughts.

He didn't seem to know what to say to that, but the warmth in his demeanor didn't lessen. He'd been more civil to her over the past two days than the past two months. "Look, this case is hitting you hard. Maybe you should ask Thomas to reassign you."

"This is _my_ case," she spat out. "You just want the solo credit."

Sara could tell that he was holding back anger, and she wondered why. He'd never restrained himself from cutting her down before - usually in public. Finally, he seemed able to form a sentence.

"Maggie told me about what Dr. Grissom said to you...in the hallway," he said bluntly, watching her carefully.

"That is _none_ of your business," she hissed, though inwardly she wanted nothing more than to sag against the wall and sink to the ground. Her past was now the watercooler gossip of Boston CSI. Great. Just _great_.

Alec held his hands up in surrender and then dropped them back to his sides, his coldness returning. "Fine. Just warning you."

"Consider me warned." She shoved herself away from the wall and headed back to the body.

~*~

"Sara, go home."

She was leaning against one of the autopsy tables, arms wrapped around her ribs, fingers curled around the cuffs of her white lab coat. Mike Pignatelli, the day shift coroner, was weighing the liver of a homicide - multiple stab wounds to the chest and neck. Only the gaping holes in the neck were visible; the rest of the skin was pulled back from the Y incision for the autopsy.

"I heard Thomas give you the night off," he tried again. "When's the last time you slept?"

She shrugged and watched him replace the liver in favor of an appendix.

"We can't do the autopsy for another five or six hours at least. The body..." Mike swallowed hard and set the appendix on the scale. "The body is still too...frozen."

She shuddered, and tried to tighten her arms around her body with no success. "Then there are other things to do. The prints...that nurse that quit the hospital. Helen McGeary."

"Hasn't she disappeared?"

"There will be a paper trail," she retorted.

"That's the police's job," he reminded her unecessarily.

"Trace on the baby," she parried back, willing her body to move. It didn't respond. How long _had_ it been since she'd slept last?

"It's with the blanket. It's...still frozen." His hands were doing something with the victim's intestines. Sara couldn't have said what, exactly; the analytical part of her mind seemed to have left her. "And if you didn't remember that, then you need sleep even more than I thought you did. If you're still here in five minutes, I'm going to call Thomas."

"You'll wake him up."

"It's worth it."

Coroner and CSI stared at each other across the body, and Sara finally pushed off from the autopsy table and left the room.


	11. Chapter 10

Sara sighed, closing her eyes and slumping in defeat. The bag slung over her right shoulder fell down and caught around her wrist, bumping against the plastic case she was carrying. "What are you doing here?"

Grissom pushed himself off from the wall, hands in his pockets. "Thomas called me."

Dimly, she thought she ought to be angry, but she was too tired. Somewhere on the way home - and she probably shouldn't have been driving - she had calculated her last sleep as the hour and a half in the break room last night, and before that, the two hours between the end of the afternoon panels and the start of shift. It wasn't that much less than her normal sleep hours, but hour-long naps scattered throughout an extremely busy day didn't allow the body to get the kind of rest it needed to keep functioning. And hers seemed to finally have given up.

So she stared at him blankly. "So?"

She knew that stance all too well. She'd seen it dozens of times. He shuffled, stared at his feet, and then looked back at her tentatively. "He told me...about your case."

And Thomas had only just escaped from her short list. "Look, I'm really not up to anything more complex than unconsciousness right now. Can we do this later?" She pushed past him and unlocked her apartment.

He followed her inside. She'd shut the door. Hadn't she? Apparently not. Not good.

"What did you mean when you said we never should have gotten married?"

Sara really didn't think she could handle Grissom in a talkative mood. She slammed the evidence case and bag down on the coffee table and turned to look at him. "It's not really a sentence open to interpretation."

"I think it is."

Oh, God, she really couldn't deal with this right now. Her thick down parka joined the case and bag on the table, and she fell down on the couch heavily.

"I don't regret marrying you, Sara."

He said it so quietly she almost didn't hear it. And when she did hear it, she wished she hadn't heard it. She dropped her head in her hands. "That's news to me."

"I never did." He seemed to struggle with the words, his posture quiet from where she could see it through her fingers, but she had no doubt those incredibly expressive eyes were fixed on her and reflecting the difficulty he was having at saying the words. Sixteen months, and it came down to this? "I love you, Sara."

And she'd thought she was too tired for anger. She jumped up on a sudden surge of adrenaline and stabbed her finger toward him. "Stop it. Just - stop saying that. You can't keep saying that like it fixes everything." To her horror, she felt tears begin to brim in her eyes. She'd never cried before him before, not about this, and she had no intention of starting now, but the more she tried to stop them, the more fell.

It was a day for firsts. His arms were warm around her and his chest was solid under her cheek, and he held her up as her body surrendered to sobs. One hand cradled the back of her head, and the other was splayed across her back, rising and falling with the heaving of her chest. He lowered her to the couch and cradled her, and slowly the tears stopped falling, and all that was left of the sobs were some very unflattering hiccoughs.

"God, Sara, you're too thin," Grissom whispered into her hair, and she didn't have an answer for him. It definitely wasn't a good idea to be sitting here on the couch with him, like this, but she was too tired to move now that the adrenaline had passed, and a selfish part of her wanted to cherish his probably temporary display of affection.

Her disorientation when she began swinging through the air was complete. "Going to hurt yourself," she slurred, as if she were drunk, and blinked rapidly as her kitchen and bedroom doorframe appeared at an entirely new angle.

The bed was incredibly soft, and she closed her eyes involuntarily, dropping into sleep for a split second before Grissom's hand on her shoulder woke her back up. She stared at him through blurry eyes.

"You can't sleep in that," he said, gesturing to the pantsuit she'd worn for the day's panels and conferences.

"Oh," she replied, squinting at the silk and weighing the cost of the dry cleaner's bill against the desire to escape to sleep.

Grissom lifted up her pillow, and her head with it, sliding the flannel pajamas out. "May I..."

She stared at him blankly, and he sighed.

There was nothing sexual about his touch, but in her half-asleep state she was aroused anyway, as if in a dream, when he slid the dark cranberry slacks off her and replaced them with the soft flannel. "I'm going to need your help here," he told her, and she lifted her hips obligingly, wriggling the rest of the way into the pajama bottoms. 

Next was the oversized t-shirt, and he opted to leave her camisole on, pulling the pajamas down over it. Sara snuggled under the covers he held lifted up for her, and lay still, watching Grissom in the semi-darkness of the room. He was still, and the slight twitching of his body told her he was debating with himself.

She would hate herself later for saying it, but she said it anyway. "Stay."

It was all he needed; he crossed to the other side of the bed and lay down on top of the covers. After a moment of stiff awkwardness, she scooted backward to press up against his chest, and he brought his arm up to lay the length of her body, his hand resting on her shoulder and his elbow on her hip bone, breath warm on the back of her neck.

"This doesn't solve anything," she whispered right before she fell asleep.

"I know," he whispered back.

~*~

_"Oh, wow, she's beautiful," Nick said softly, reaching a tentative finger down to touch the baby's cheek. "You did a great job, Sara."_

_She smiled tiredly, but beatifically, tearing her gaze away from her daughter for a second to look at her friend. "Thanks, Nicky. Griss had something to do with it too, you know." Her husband squeezed her shoulder from where he sat perched on the other side of the hospital bed._

_"And if we're lucky, she'll take after her mother in looks," Warrick snarked from behind Nick, and Catherine smacked his shoulder with her open palm._

_"Is she waking up?" Greg asked excitedly, standing on tiptoes to hook his chin over Nick's shoulder and look down at the new mother and baby._

_The baby girl blinked her eyes open and squinted, screwing up her mouth in confusion._

_"She's got your eyes, Gil," Catherine told him, and it was true. Beautiful, crystal-clear blue eyes that already seemed to be looking out at the world with curiosity._

_"Babies are all born with blue eyes," he told her pedantically, but ruined his lecture tone with a proud grin._

_"No name yet, huh?" Nick asked, sneaking another touch. His index finger was almost bigger than the baby's entire fist._

_"We still haven't decided," Grissom said, shaking his head._

_"We'll wait a few more days and see if that helps us narrow it down," Sara added, and then yawned convulsively. "Sorry!"_

_"Hey, you've had a long night," Warrick said. "We're gone. Get your rest."_

_"And isn't it just like a Grissom to be born during night shift?" Catherine tossed off as she followed Warrick out of the room. Nick and Greg lingered a few moments more, and then they left as well._

_"I'll call the nurse to come and bring her back to the nursery," Grissom said, and smiled and shook his head, touching his daughter's cheek in much the same way Nick had earlier, with infinite gentleness._

_"Mhm," Sara agreed drowsily, exhausted but unwilling to spend even a minute apart from the baby. "We can't keep calling her 'her', Grissom."_

_"We'll figure it out," he promised her, and kissed her temple. "Go to sleep, Mom."_

~*~

The slight smile on Sara's face morphed into a frown the instant she realized where she was waking up, and why. Shivering, she pulled her knees up and curled away from Grissom, who was still sound asleep on top of the covers.

Nine-thirty PM. Technically, Thomas _had_ given her the night off - but an hour and a half from now, Rachel Sedgwick, the night shift coroner, would be starting Gregory Itzin's autopsy, and Sara had to be there.

She shifted slowly, so as not to wake Grissom. He was a light sleeper - not as light as she was, but still -

"Sara?"

Damn. "I have to go in to work." She had almost told him to go back to sleep, as she had dozens of times before. God. It was too easy a hole to fall back into, and this time she didn't think she'd be able to climb out.

"You have the night off."

"I have an autopsy to be at."

In response, he reached out to tug her back against him. She tolerated it until he relaxed, and then rocked against him, trying to create enough momentum to escape his arm. No such luck. "_Grissom_."

"Talk to me, Sara," he pleaded, still holding on tightly, so tightly she had to fight against the impulse to thrash and get clear of his arms.

"You missed your chance," she snapped, as the panic began to rise. "You let me leave."

"You said it was only a temporary separation," he said, truly confused. "You wouldn't have stayed anyway."

"You didn't even try to stop me, did you?" She needed to get out of the bed, now. "Let go of me. Now." He still didn't respond, and the terror she had been fighting finally took hold. He may have outmassed her, but the adrenaline of an imminent panic attack was pumping through her veins, and she broke his grip easily to careen over the side of the bed and hit the floor with a thump. She didn't care. She was in open space again, and breathing was easier.

"What was that all about?" Coupled with the confusion were hints of anger and frustration.

"Why did you never ask before?" she shot back, pushing herself away from the bed until her back hit the wall, and bringing her knees up to her chest, arms wrapped tightly around her shins. "We were married for sixteen months, Grissom, and I know more about my coworkers here than I do about you."

"We're still married," he pointed out.

"Technicalities," she snarled back. "We got married for all the wrong reasons, and they only got more wrong the longer we stayed married."

Grissom was finally silent, and she pushed on while she still had the courage to continue. "I still don't know what the hell made us think that marriage was the right solution to me getting pregnant."

"It worked," he said wistfully, and their eyes connected over the rumpled bedsheets.

Sara smiled softly. "Yeah, it did. For a little while. It was great."

Neither of them stated the obvious. It was there, and it needed to be said, but neither of them could bring themselves to go there just yet.

_It worked while we had the baby to focus on._


	12. Chapter 11

It had been years since Sara had vomited during an autopsy - the liquid decomp in Vegas had been the last time, now that she recalled - but Gregory Itzin's small body brought out her gag reflex for entirely different reasons. The same nausea from the crime scene clawed its way up her throat and she pressed the back of her hand against her mouth so hard she thought she must be bruising her lips.

"You okay?" Rachel looked up at her, studying the CSI's face carefully.

"Yeah. Yeah, it's just..." Sara gestured with the hand not holding her mouth closed.

The coroner nodded in understanding. "I can count on one hand the number of infant autopsies I've done." She pressed the back of one gloved finger against Gregory's blue cheek. Someone, probably Rachel before Sara had arrived, had closed his eyes. "Every one is one too many."

Sara nodded, but didn't trust herself to speak - or, for that matter, to open her mouth. Rachel turned back to the body and began speaking aloud for both the tape recorder and Sara's benefit.

An hour and a half later, Rachel peeled off her gloves and shook her head. "This is a perfectly healthy baby."

"No cause of death." 

It wasn't really a question, but Rachel shrugged anyway. "None apparent. No evidence of any sort of foul play. My best ruling is SIDS."

"SIDS," Sara breathed, and her vision went gray at the edges.

"Sudden Infant De - "

"I know what it means," Sara snapped back, and was instantly remorseful. "I'm sorry, Rachel, you didn't deserve that, it's just..." She shook herself. "The blanket?"

The coroner looked at her oddly for a few seconds, and Sara wondered if Maggie had been to the morgue yet to spread her new gossip. Probably. "It's right here. I bagged it first thing."

"Thanks." She plucked the paper bag from the counter and nearly slammed into Alec when she turned to exit.

"Sara!" His brow wrinkled in confusion. "What are you doing here?"

"Attending an autopsy," she returned, as if it weren't obvious.

"I hope it wasn't the Itzin case," he informed her, and then pushed past her to where Rachel was stitching up the tiny Y incision. "You haven't seen Thomas tonight, have you."

"What are you talking about?" She narrowed her eyes and crossed her arms as best she could while holding an evidence bag in her right hand. "Look, I'm sorry I didn't page you, I was running with the case and you were out with Fiorelli serving a warrant on your penthouse burglar."

"It's not your case to run with anymore," he told her testily, and reached for the evidence bag. She swirled on her heels to keep it away from him; a childish game, she knew, but sometime since the crime scene their temporary truce seemed to have been obliterated.

"What do you mean, it's not my case?" She knew exactly what he meant. She just wanted the satisfaction of forcing him to admit that he'd gone behind her back. Rage was burning inside of her - how _dare_ he, how dare Thomas, and - Grissom. Grissom must have known. 

Alec Tremain was many things, but not a coward. "You were too involved. Thomas agreed. I'm handling it solo. We've got a search warrant on the missing nurse's apartment coming, and fingerprints and DNA to match. It's a slam dunk, and there's no reason to have two CSIs on it anymore, especially when one of them is..." He trailed off.

"When one of them is what, Alec?" She jabbed her left index finger hard into his chest, jamming the bones together and grinding the joints, so hard she thought she might have sprained it. "When one of them is _what_?"

"When one of them is obviously suffering from impaired judgement because of an emotional attachment to a case," he replied coolly, and wrested the paper bag from her hand.

"I have never jeopardized a case in my life," Sara said shakily, but knew she'd lost.

"It's out of my hands now," and there was just a hint of apology in his voice.

She ignored it and took petty pleasure in knocking his arm with her shoulder as she passed him on her way out.

~*~

Unlike her locker in Vegas had been, Sara's locker at Boston CSI was bare, containing only the essentials: two changes of clothes, a bottle of aspirin, a light jacket she'd left there that fall and never brought home, a small bag of toiletries, and a crumpled bag of Hershey's Kisses. No pictures, nothing personal.

"Hey," Jonas said softly beside her, and jumped when she slammed the locker door shut, two aspirins in her hand. The headache had started on the walk over from the morgue, and while she normally didn't like to take drugs unless it was an emergency, she wanted to face Thomas with a clear mind, and in eight hours she had to be at Harvard, smiling and presenting the wonders of forensic science.

"Jonas, I am really not in the mood for chitchat." She seemed to be saying entirely too many things she regretted these days. "And don't take anything I say for the next week or so personally, okay?"

"Sure." He smiled crookedly, like he'd had his jaw knocked out of alignment at some point. It wasn't at all attractive, but it was endearing. "You want to talk about it?"

He'd never offered that before, and he couldn't have offered it at a worse time. "Not really." She swallowed the aspirin dry, wincing slightly as one of them caught in her throat, working the muscles frantically to get it down before the gag reflex kicked in.

"Okay," he replied amiably, and sprawled in one of the hard plastic seats that lined the locker room, knees splayed apart and hands resting palm up on his thighs. It was a welcoming posture, and it probably served him well in interrogations. Some people went their whole lives never quite able to pull off that combination of guilessness and open trust. Jonas came by it naturally.

Sara leaned her forehead against the cool metal of the locker, watching Jonas out of the corner of her eye. "If you're ever in Vegas, Jonas, head to CSI and look up a guy named Nick Stokes. You'd get along great. He's from Texas." She didn't know why she'd added that detail, only knew that it had somehow become tied up in her fast-fading memories of Nick: Texas drawl and gentle smile and the taste of ice cream on a hot August night.

"Texas, huh?" There was that lopsided grin again. "I don't know about that. He's not one of those Southerners who's still bitter about the Civil War, is he? I had a great-times-something grandfather who wore blue. Fought at Gettysburg with Colonel Chamberlain in the Twentieth Maine."

"Jonas?" She shifted to lean her shoulder against the locker and cross her arms, looking at him with one eyebrow raised.

"Yeah?"

"You're babbling."

His tone was suddenly serious again, and he leaned forward on his elbows. "Is it working?"

Sara offered him a smile with just a hint of teeth. "Little bit, yeah. Thanks."

There was a comfortable lapse in conversation for a few seconds, interrupted by the sound of Jonas's pager. "That's Thomas. Uhm...should I let him know that you're going to be bearding him in his lair, or..."

In spite of herself, Sara laughed. "No. I'm just...going to go home."

"Good." He paused at the door, looked back over his shoulder for a brief moment, and then left the room.

~*~

She didn't go home, though she did get off at Park Street to change to the right line. She had every intention of getting on the Red Line, but somehow she kept walking and found herself exiting the station into a chill, clear night.

Boston Common was very nearly deserted at this time of night - or, more correctly, morning - and Sara kept her hands firmly in her pockets against the icy cold. The snow of a few days ago had crusted over, the top layer melting in the warmth of the day and then freezing solid again with the night. Light from the street lamps reflected off the layer of ice, sometimes refracting into color. At the other end of the Common, she could hear the honks and complaints of car horns - a show letting out at the Wang, probably.

Her boots scuffed at the concrete of the path aimlessly, tracing patterns in the sand laid down so no one would slip on the ice on the paths. Soon, she couldn't feel her toes, or any other extremeties, but she walked on.

The next park bench she came across proved to be her salvation as her legs gave out just as it came into view. Sara sat down heavily, shivering hard. The measure of peace that the silent snow had wrought in her disappeared as her far-too-good memory confronted her with the images of Gregory's body lying on the autopsy table, tiny and perfect and cut open. Tiny and perfect and covered in a plastic bag and thrown in a dumpster.

Tiny and perfect and swathed in a soft pink blanket, not moving, not breathing...

Sara leaned over and vomited violently, the granola bar she had eaten on her way into work burning its way back up her throat. Her gag reflex continued long after the contents of her stomach were emptied, and her abdominal muscles clenched weakly as she sobbed and retched.

"Ma'am? Ma'am, are you okay?" The beat cop shined his flashlight directly in her face and she winced, holding up her hand to deflect the glare. "Do you need me to call an ambulance?"

"I'm fine, Chris," she croaked out, the acid burn in her throat making her voice hoarse. She swallowed convulsively. "I just - I haven't been feeling well."

"Mrs. Grissom?" Chris Landry moved the last few steps forward, recognizing her. "Are you sure you're okay?"

She nodded and wiped away the iced tears from her face with the back of her glove, wishing she had a tissue or something to wipe her mouth. Her wet lips were chapping rapidly. "Yeah. I'm all right."

"If you don't mind me asking, what are you doing here? This isn't really a safe place to be at this time of the night." He was still young, so young she half-expected his voice to break in the middle of his sentence. "Is there a crime scene near here? No one told me anything."

"I just wanted to take a walk," was her childishly simple response, and she found that she didn't really have a better explanation for him than that. Oh, God, she really was finally cracking. How long had she slept that afternoon? Two, three hours? And all of them tense and dream-filled, which didn't give the body anywhere near the amount of rest it really needed.

"I don't think you're okay," Chris said to himself slowly, and unhooked his radio from his belt. "Dispatch, this is Officer Landry. I need you to patch me through to CSI Thomas Roman."

"Copy. CSI Roman is in the field right now..."

"This is important," Chris cut them off, and Sara flushed angrily. She wanted to tell him that she was fine, that she could just get up and walk back to Park Street - and then she realized that the T had stopped running probably twenty minutes ago. So she remained mute, shaking violently from the cold, the taste in her mouth growing more and more sour by the second, trying desperately to push the images out of her mind.

And then she realized that she hadn't heard a word of the conversation that had just taken place between Thomas and Chris.

"I'm going to take you back to headquarters, ma'am," Chris said, and reached forward to take her arm just below the elbow. Obviously, she was supposed to brace herself against him and stand. Her mind understood the concept.

Her body refused to cooperate. He tugged, and she pushed off feebly with her feet. He was a strong man, and could probably have pulled her up even with the minimal help she was offering him, but sparks exploded in front of her vision and she felt her muscles go lax just before she slipped into unconsciousness.


	13. Chapter 12

Sara regained consciousness soon after she'd fainted, and all she had to show for the incident was some nasty ice burn on her cheek from where she'd teetered sideways to fall onto the snow. When Chris pulled in to Boston Police headquarters, Thomas and Megan were waiting outside, even in the icy cold.

She had the distinct impression that Megan wanted to make a comment about her relative sanity in relation to wandering Boston Common at one in the morning, but Thomas touched the older woman's arm and shook his head. Together, they helped Sara into the building despite her protests that she was fine, and if she could just borrow a van to drive home, she would stop bothering them in the middle of shift.

They ignored her, of course, and she did have to admit to an incredible sense of relief when they draped her across the couch in a mostly unused break room, one that was generally used for CSIs pulling doubles to catch some sleep. It smelled musty, and boasted nothing more impressive than a sink and paper towel dispenser. Its most important furnishings were without a doubt the two overstuffed garage sale couches lining the walls.

Thomas left and returned with a damp towel, which Sara pushed away irritably. "I'm not wasting away from scarlet fever, Thomas. I just want to go home, okay?"

"Nope, not okay," Megan said cheerfully, and Sara squinted at her, trying with little success to inject venom into the gaze. "You're not driving yourself anywhere."

"Then I'll call a cab." She tried to get up, but Thomas's strong arm held her to the couch.

"Home," Sara repeated stubbornly, and ruined the effect by popping her jaw with a yawn. Her eyes drifted shut for just a moment, and she rolled her head to the side. "Home," she mumbled again, unsure whether she meant her Cambridge apartment or the Las Vegas townhouse.

"She needs to see a doctor, Thomas," Megan hissed sotto voce, apparently unaware that Sara was awake enough to hear her, much less understand her.

"She's not sick, Megan, and she hates doctors. You know that," Thomas chided gently. 

"If she's not sick then what is she?" The second half of the sentence dropped dramatically in volume, as if Megan had only remembered halfway through that Sara was lying on the couch semi-conscious.

"Under a great deal of stress," Thomas rebutted. "Alec came to me and asked me to have her taken off the Itzin case. She was becoming too involved."

"What happened between her and Gil?" Megan's fingers reached out to brush some of Sara's dark hair from her forehead, and in her sleepy state Sara smiled softly. She still wasn't quite sure if she was dreaming or not, and a slight pang of guilt told her she probably shouldn't let them go on thinking she couldn't hear them, but she was so tired.

"It's between her and Gil."

"Dammit, Thomas, it's killing her. It's killing both of them." Megan's hand shook on Sara's forehead.

"I'll forgive you the melodrama, Megan," he said, and Sara smiled lazily again. She could picture his face as he said that - eyebrow raised, head tipped slightly to the side.

There was a pause that Sara imagined was full of Megan glaring at Thomas. "You know, don't you. You know what happened." There was a whoosh of air at Sara's ear as Megan stood abruptly. "I was doing the sabbatical in Scotland when Sara came to Boston. Something happened during the six months I was there."

It was comforting to know that there was someone within a hundred yard radius who hadn't heard Grissom yelling after her down the hallway.

"Gil called me when Sara submitted her leave of absence in Vegas," Thomas admitted.

"You didn't feel the need to enlighten me about that when you called me to tell me Sara was going to Boston. What did he tell you?"

"It's none of our business."

"You are so infuriating sometimes, Thomas," she snapped at him. "It's times like these I'm glad you never married, and especially glad I never married you." There was no response to that, and in a few seconds, Megan spoke again. "What are we supposed to do?"

"Nothing. Don't push her, Megan. Whatever you do, don't push her. She and Gil will either work this out, or they won't. Sara's strong. She'll survive this."

Sara came fully awake when he said that, every sense straining to discern how he was going to finish that thought. Thomas knew probably better than anyone in the world just what she could survive. But he didn't continue.

"And Gil? Will he?"

Thomas didn't have an aswer for that. "Take her home, Megan. Get that scrape treated, put her to bed."

There were a few moments of silence, and then Sara felt Megan's hand on her shoulder. "Wake up, kid. I'm going to take you home."

She faked a rise to consciousness, and refused Thomas's offer of a shoulder to lean on to walk out to Megan's car.

~*~

"I really should be driving you straight to the hospital."

"I just want to go home," Sara said softly, forehead pressed against the cool glass of the passenger side window of the rented Lexus. "It's the next left."

Megan drummed her fingers on the steering wheel as they passed a blue sign with a white H in it - an arrow underneath pointing straight ahead. She rolled to a stop at the lights and kept her fingers rolling in a staccato beat, finally flicking on the blinker to turn left just as the light turned green.

"Do you have a couch?"

"Yes," Sara answered, confused, and then sat up straight. "No, Megan, you're presenting in the morning. Thomas shouldn't have kept you out of bed by sending you with me."

Megan pulled the car into the parking garage and into the first available space, turning the car off before responding. "I would say that we care about you, but given how that's been received in the past, I'm not going to try."

Sara winced slightly; she had, in a way, deserved that. But that didn't stop the frustration from spilling out. "What brought this on?"

But the older woman had already exited the car and was coming around to Sara's side. Before Megan could reach her, she hissed and opened the door herself, grinding her teeth through the blood rush to her head that momentarly incapacitated her vision.

"Keys," was the other CSI's only word as she held her hand out flatly, and Sara dug into her bag and dropped the key ring into the outstretched palm.

They were both still silent as they climbed the stairs and entered the darkened apartment. Megan, businesslike, took Sara's jacket and bag and set them on the coffee table and then searched around until she disappeared into the bedroom.

Sara watched her; the cycle of hyperactivity and utter exhaustion she'd been running on for the past few days seemed to have reached another one of its low points, and when she saw Megan enter the bedroom she gave up on trying to figure out what the other woman hoped to accomplish and slumped down on the couch.

"This will sting like hell," Megan told her, materializing at her side with a swab in hand. "Grin and bear it, or suffer through my lecture on the scientific analysis of just what types of bacteria are likely to be found in snow."

It did indeed sting, and snapped Sara back to the situation at hand with a yelp, but Megan was already done and dabbing at the rash with gauze.

"I'm not going to cover it, so just remember to sleep on your other cheek tonight, okay?"

Sara nodded slightly, and wondered what time it was, exactly, A shift of her head brought her in line with the clock on the cable box - 2:03 AM. "I'll, ah, I'll go find you a blanket or something." The linen closet was in her bedroom, and she concentrated on placing foot in front of foot to get there; later, she wouldn't be able to swear to the exact chain of events, but eventually she did end up in front of the couch holding several blankets and a pillow.

"Sit down, Sara." Megan patted the couch next to her. Sara dumped the blankets and pillow on the coffee table, adding to the already precarious pile there, and sat down obediently.

The serologist took a deep breath, and Sara watched her expectantly, feeling two years old but willing to humor her friend if it would lead to her sleeping sooner.

"You're not going to want to hear any of this, but I'm going to say it anyway." Before Sara could express her opinion on the as-yet-unknown subject either way, Megan barreled ahead, her words clipped and running together.

"You're one of the best CSIs I've ever known. I regretted losing you to the Vegas lab for months, but I was so happy you'd gone. I knew what it would mean for your career." She looked down at her laced fingers. "I can't say I wasn't too surprised when I heard that you and Gil had married. I knew you two knew each other, and I remembered how eager you'd been to see him again." She finally looked up from her fingers again to look Sara in the face. "And then barely a year later Thomas called me, and told me that you had come to him asking for a temporary assignment. I won't apologize for being nosy, but Thomas has known you even longer than I have, and...he's been so worried about you. And now I can see why."

Silent tears were running down Sara's face as she looked at her former mentor, but didn't say anything, so Megan continued.

"What happened to you, Sara?" she whispered. She held up her hand quickly. "No, I know. This is something even I can't blunder my way into making you explain. But there's obviously something going on that no one but you and maybe Gil understand, and it's tearing you apart. And it's not just destroying you, it's destroying your career. You have to fix this."

Sara was silent for a few long moments, and then she nodded slowly. Thoughts were churning in her head, words from the past mixing with images mixing with all the grief and pain that she'd managed to convince herself was behind her when really, she'd just ignored it in the hopes that it would fade quietly.

"I know. I...I know," she said shakily, and stood and took a few steps toward the bedroom. "Megan?"

The older woman looked back at her apprehensively.

"Thanks."


	14. Chapter 13

There was someone else in her apartment.

Sara froze, slitting her eyes open. Her body ached, as if it had held the exact same position for entirely too long. She didn't even remember dreaming - something of a first for her since she'd moved to Boston. And it was nine in the morning.

There was someone in her apartment _and_ she was late for the morning's seminars.

The trained investigator in her took hold, pushing the scared girl behind the carefully built façade, and she was able to identify the noises that had alerted her to the intruder as coming from the kitchen, and sounding distinctly like her cupboards opening and closing. And there - that was the creak from the cupboard above the stove.

She snuck her fingers out from under the covers and grasped the vase by her bed, pulling the carved wooden roses out of it and setting them down on her night stand. Carl had given her the fake flowers to celebrate the opening of the forensics conference, saying jokingly that with what little time she spent at home, she'd never have a chance to appreciate real roses.

The crystal was comfortably heavy in her hand, and Sara tried to make as little noise as possible as she slid out from underneath the covers and tiptoed to her bedroom door - slightly ajar. She hefted the vase to a better striking position and leaned over to peek through the crack.

"Grissom, what the hell are you doing in my kitchen?"

He spun, eggshell in hand. "Making you breakfast?"

"Making me breakfast," she repeated, and lowered the vase, opening the door the rest of the way. "Why are you here?"

"Megan called me about an hour ago," he told her, his back already turned to her again as he tossed the eggshell into the sink for the garbage disposal to pick up.

"I don't have a garbage disposal," she told him, annoyed, and set the vase down on the peninsula counter on her way to fish the shell out of the sink and throw it away.

"Oh." Grissom watched her from where he stood at the stove. "We do at home."

"_You_ do at home," she corrected him. "You should be at the conference. _I_ should be at the conference."

"Eat," he instructed her, and set the plateful of eggs in front of one of the bar stools on the other side of the peninsula.

"I never eat breakfast," she snapped, sitting down on the stool but pushing the plate toward him. "I drink coffee. I have a routine, Grissom. Stop ordering me around."

"Sara." He pushed the plate back toward her. "The coffee is almost done, and you need to eat something, too."

"Since when do you care?" she shot back, and resisted the childish urge to shove the plate at him so hard it slid off the other side of the counter. "And don't you dare say 'since I met you.' You come here, you say things like you never regretted marrying me, you keep telling me that you love me. You haven't bothered calling me once since I came here, Grissom. And God knows you barely said ten words in a row to me for the months before that, except at work."

Sara stood abruptly. "I told you once that I wished I was like you, so that I wouldn't have to feel anything. I take it back. I never want to be so far removed from the human race that I can't even feel anything when my own daughter dies."

There. She'd said it. She'd finally crossed that unspoken line and put the facts out in the open. Seven months of pained silence and studied avoidance, and this was the first time the subject had actually been raised between them.

Probably for a reason.

Gil Grissom was not a man who was quick to temper; at least, not in his personal life. Sara had always wondered how much of that was due to stringent self-control and how much was due to a generally complacent personality.

She had her answer now.

"You think I didn't feel anything?" His voice was low, taut, and he placed his palms flat on the counter and leaned forward slightly, his face filled with anger. "How dare you. How _dare_ you."

Grissom rounded the end of the countertop, and Sara took an involuntary step back.

"Those hours were the happiest of my entire life," he snarled, his hands now fisted at his side. "I have spent every second of every day since then asking myself why she was taken from us. I don't have an answer. I may never have an answer. But while I was looking for one, I lost my wife, too."

Sara felt the tears begin to roll down her cheeks and she blinked rapidly, trying to clear them out of her eyes.

"Did you think I was lying to you when I told you I loved you? When I told you how happy I was to be having a child, even if the circumstances weren't ideal?" He let out a bitter, rueful bark of laughter. "You must think even less of me than I feared."

"What was I supposed to think, Griss?" Her voice was quiet and broken, and she brought her hand up to drag a knuckle across her eyes. "You weren't there to tell me any differently. _Nick_ drove me home from the hospital because there were bugs on a body in a motel room somewhere."

"I didn't..." His impetus seemed to finally be broken. "I didn't know how to...I didn't understand. Work made sense. And then you were just gone."

"I wasn't 'just gone', Grissom," Sara said tiredly, finally looking away from him and sitting down on the couch heavily. "I left three months later. And it's been four months since then. And in those seven months, we never said any of this."

"We should have," was his soft response, and when she looked up again, he was sitting on the coffee table in front of her. "How did we end up like this?"

"We seem to have a lot of talent in that area," she told him, and laughed weakly at her own sentence, sniffling inelegantly. "God, Griss, she was so beautiful."

"I know." If she didn't know any better, she would have said his tone was tight with repressed tears. She looked up and was stunned to see that her guess had been correct. "She looked like her mother."

"But she had her daddy's eyes," Sara added gently, a slight smile twisting her lips. "She probably would have been a liberal arts major."

"I hoped she'd be a poet," Grissom whispered.

Sara's eyes fluttered closed briefly, and when she opened them, she saw a tear sliding down his cheek. Slowly, she reached out and brushed it away with her fingers.

"No chalk this time either," he said, attempting something like a smile.

"No," she agreed. "But do you feel like taking that walk now?"

~*~

They didn't really talk about anything important.

Maybe that was the point.

Right now, Sara didn't really feel up to much more than putting one foot in front of the other, strolling down the sidewalk in a slow, even stride. Grissom matched her, and every so often they brushed up against each other. It wasn't true physical contact - layers of down and wool and acrylic separated their skin - but all the same, it felt breathtakingly intimate to be walking together in broad daylight on a Cambridge street.

He asked her what it was like to work crime scenes in the cold, and she asked him whether Catherine was really going to switch to days. The newest issue of _Applied Psychodynamics in Forensic Science_ had contained an article on the role of computer simulation in predicting blood spatter trajectory and patterning, and they held a spirited debate about the use of technology in forensic science. Predictably, Sara couldn't wait to try the new programming, and Grissom was more inclined to continue dropping dummies and rotting pigs.

But predictability was good, too.

They talked about Thomas, and Megan, and any of a half dozen other forensic scientists in attendance at the conference. Grissom told her about how Thomas had taken him out to a sports bar for a Red Sox game five years ago during a conference in New Hampshire, and how a roomful of half-drunk construction workers had decided that a Cubs fan was almost as good as a Sox fan, and had sobbed into their beer when the Sox had blown a 12-4 lead in the eighth inning.

Sara told a story about Megan in San Francisco, and first time she'd thrown up at a crime scene - a partial decomp caught in a grate in the sewer system. They'd both stood there in the stink and the muck and had to laugh at the complete chance of the maintenance worker even finding the body, much less identifying it as human. It turned out to be a missing persons, a homeless person who had lived in one of the crumbling, unused sections and had hit his head and fallen into the sludge trying to get up to the street.

It was never really anything about themselves, just stories about other people that happened to peripherally involve them. But after so many months of silence, it felt good just to talk again, to debate and engage their minds in the old way. It had been the utter nothingness of grief that had destroyed them more than anything else, the complete inability to interact without reopening barely healed wounds. Grissom had turned to Catherine, and Sara to Nick, both of them completely unable to turn to the other in a twisted circle that was, while understandable, the worst thing they could have done.

For now, the light chitchat that most couples were eager to bypass would prove their salvation.


	15. Chapter 14

"Hey, Sara." Carl slung an arm around her before coming up on her left side to look down at her. "Feeling better?"

She considered confronting him and asking him just how he knew she'd been upset, but she had a strong suspicion that the source of his information was across the room, nibbling on a pastry and chatting to Philip Rosten about his presentation. In retrospect, it probably hadn't been a good idea to schedule a seminar on decomposition stages right before the lunch break - there were quite a few young CSIs wandering around in varying shades of green.

"Much, thank you." She offered him up a genuine smile and tossed the coffee stir stick in the basket provided. "Sorry I wasn't here this morning."

"Megan made it very clear that she didn't even expect you here this afternoon." Carl paused in his action of putting the creamer back on the table. "Why are you here this afternoon?"

"This is my responsibility," she said simply.

"Uhm," Carl said, tapping his fingers against the side of his mug. "And you and Gil..."

She just arched an eyebrow.

"Right. None of my business. I know." He turned as if to leave, and then stopped. "But I saw that smile on your face, Sara. I'm glad you two worked something out."

"Yeah," she said to herself more than to his retreating back, "so am I."

She was still lost in the afterglow of her first real conversation with Grissom in so many months. Their problems weren't behind them now - the moments of awkwardness and grief had still outnumbered the easy camraderie - but just the end of the silence made a world of difference in at least Sara's ability to deal with it.

Most couples, she reflected, didn't start out with marriage and work from there to establish the foundation of a relationship.

"Penny for your thoughts?" Ken asked, coming up behind her with a smile. "On second thought, from the look on your face, I'd have to offer you at least a silver dollar. You still with us?"

"Right here," Sara reassured him. "What did you think of Dr. Rosten's seminar?"

The chemistry professor snorted and shook his head. "I think I'm very glad I'm in the academic world. I've never smelled anything that disgusting in my life." He frowned, a thought occuring to him. "I didn't see you there, though."

"I just got here," she replied with a shrug, and didn't elaborate further even when faced with the question in his eyes. "I've attended similar seminars at other conferences, though, so I've got a pretty good idea. And...well, I've seen and smelled enough of it on crime scenes."

"Right." Another snort of disbelief. "I'll leave that stuff to you." Something beyond her field of vision caught his eye, and he excused himself, leaving her standing alone beside the coffee table with a rapidly-cooling mug of sludge.

Not alone for long, though - she would know that gentle pressure on her elbow anywhere. Grissom circled around to face her with a shy smile. "Hey."

"Hey," she replied, and they stood quietly for a few moments before Sara continued. "You know, everyone in the room just started speculating about what it means that we're talking."

"Let them," he said in the matter-of-fact voice that was so like him. "Will you have dinner with me tonight?"

Her eyes widened and she almost moved backward a step before she caught herself. "Um, Griss, I don't know if..." She caught herself at the look of fear in his eyes. "I'm working."

"Seven?" he suggested, raising an eyebrow.

Sara considered, weighed, and measured all the possible reasons why rushing a relationship with Grissom would be adverse to her mental health right now.

"Seven works."

~*~

"I'm - sorry." Sara opened the door to let Grissom in and immediately rushed back to the kitchen, where she downed the last bit of coffee in a mug she set in the sink. "Marianne called. Her son's got some twenty-four hour bug that's going around, and she asked if I could take her place as Boston CSI's liaison on the outing tonight. I tried to page you..."

"I left it in Vegas."

Sara skidded to a stop on her way back into her bedroom. "You what?"

"I left my pager in my desk drawer. Catherine's probably trying to figure out where the noise came from right now."

She swallowed convulsively. "Wow, Grissom, that's...why would you do that?"

He shrugged easily, and the movement did a lot to remind her of just how good he looked in his casual charcoal jacket and dark blue button-down shirt. "I didn't want to be disturbed."

"Oh." She blinked once, twice, and continued on her previous trajectory into the bedroom, thoughts churning. Grissom had left his pager at home. He hadn't wanted to be disturbed. That was...unprecedented. Her investigator's mind began to turn over all the possible meanings to "I didn't want to be disturbed," and she ended by tossing them all out the window. Normal rules didn't tend to apply when trying to understand anything that came out of Grissom's mouth.

She returned from the bedroom, having straightened the covers and grabbed an extra change of clothes - she would have to go straight to work.

"We still need to talk," she informed him, stuffing dark pants and a navy blue sweater into the small travel bag she'd bought for that express purpose.

He didn't say anything. It looked like they were back to uncommunicative Grissom.

Okay, fine, she could deal with that. "I mean, yeah, we talked about...things, but there's still a lot of...stuff that we need to get out, and this probably works out for the best, because I don't think a dinner atmosphere would really have been the best place to talk about all the ways a relationship can go sour."

Oh, God, was she babbling? She was babbling. There was a reason this went much easier when he participated in the discussion.

"Hello? Grissom?"

"I'm listening," he pointed out mildly from where he'd perched himself on a corner of her couch, able to watch her move about the apartment as she gathered her things for work and for the seminar on snowed-in crime scenes that Marianne had been scheduled to supervise.

Sara blew a frustrated breath out through her lips, pushing the hair out of her face from where it had fallen as she knelt over, trying to find her heavy waterproofed boots in the back of the coat closet that doubled as a utility closet in the back of the kitchen. "It's just, what I'm saying is - ow!" She sucked on her tongue ruefully; she'd hit her head on the bottom shelf trying to pull back with the boots and had bitten part of her tongue, hard.

"Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," she grumbled, pushing herself off from the floor and carrying the boots over to set them by the door. A subject change was in order; clearly they weren't quite up to discussing any of the myriad issues that surrounded them just yet. "How much do you know about crime scenes in the snow?"

"Not as much as I'd like," he admitted. "We don't get many of them in Las Vegas."

"Ha ha," she snarked back, packing her lighter, everyday wear boots in the travel bag to go with her clothes for work later that night. "That's the seminar I have to babysit tonight." Suddenly shy, she stood up straight and looked at him, looking more natural than he had any right to be while sitting on the arm of her couch. "I can't make dinner, but I can offer you fun with Snow Print Wax."

"As long as I can take a raincheck," Grissom reassured her with a slight smile.

"Deal."


	16. Chapter 15

"Sara, Alec, if you could stay for a few minutes," Thomas told them, leaning back in his chair, the last assignment slip in his hand. Maggie cast a suspicious look at them both, and preceded Jonas out of the room with a flounce.

"I've only got one assignment left," Thomas continued when they were the only three people in the break room.

"As long as it's inside, I'll take it," Sara joked. She wasn't sure her toes had thawed out yet, despite the extra layer of wool socks she'd worn inside her waterproof boots. The seminar had been fascinating, and it had gone a long way toward re-establishing her working camraderie with Grissom, but it had made her long for the dry heat of Vegas.

"It is," Thomas confirmed, but didn't hand the assignment slip over. "Alec, what kind of progress was made on the kidnapped Itzin baby?"

Sara shifted uncomfortably in her seat, but kept her mouth shut. She'd decided against telling Thomas exactly how angry with him she was for taking her off the case; thinking through it rationally, he had been correct. Alec was another story entirely, but he didn't even seem to register the fury directed toward him as he cleared his throat and began to outline the case.

"We've got fingerprints and DNA samples that have been positively identified as belonging to our perpetrator; intial analysis says XX. We've got a suspect, one Helen McGeary, a forty-eight year old nurse who's worked in the maternity ward at Boston City for six months now. She didn't show up for work the next day, and she was working the shift just before the baby was taken - everyone else on both those shifts has already been excluded based on voluntary printing and DNA sampling. The police have not yet been able to track her down; a search of her apartment revealed nothing incriminating, which leads me to believe she either hasn't been back to her apartment since the baby was taken, or she didn't make her plans at her own apartment.

"The boy's body was found approximately thirty-six hours after the initial call, two blocks away from the hospital. Autopsy has ruled SIDS as cause of death, time of death placed at some twenty-four hours earlier than the body was found. The plastic bag he was found in is down with fingerprinting now, and has been since we found it. Tim has been working as hard as he can to lift anything off of it, but it was out overnight in a dumpster, and the morning frost may have obliterated anything useful."

Thomas nodded, taking it all in, and Sara tried not to fidget. "What else?"

"It's a classic case of baby-stealing," Alec said, leaning forward, and Sara was interested in his analysis despite herself. He was a very good CSI, all other things aside. "By all acounts, Helen McGeary was incredibly frustrated with her job. She had an above-average intelligence and almost no empathy. She was frequently heard to mention the fact that she'd wanted to be a doctor, but had been limited to nursing because she was a woman. Nursing as a profession has historically been undervalued, and in a large, extremely busy hospital, her self-worth must not have felt very high. The staff development coordinator even mentioned that she would have preferred someone with more empathy, but faced with a national nursing shortage, they had to hire every qualified person they came across.

"Until as the police can locate McGeary, leading us to a possible accomplice and second crime scene, there aren't any advances that can be made in the case. There are still questions to answer, the most obvious being - was she taking the baby for herself, or to sell? But apart from that, there's no further evidentiary work to be done on the case."

"Good," Thomas said, and set the assignment slip flat on the table. "This just came in."

Sara grabbed the sheet of paper before Alec could even lean forward, and read it quickly. "Boston General. Shift change. Single mother. Bassinet in the basement - it's the same MO."

"I want you both on this case," Thomas said, holding up a hand to forestall Alec's protests. "It's high-profile. The news has already latched on to it. We were barely able to inform Monica Itzin that we'd found the body before they went to her for interviews. And now, this...you're the two best CSIs I have, and not just on night shift. Across all the shifts. We need this solved, and fast. Time may be running out." He fixed them each with a piercing glare in turn. "I don't care what personal issues you have between you. Work them out, and work together. This is not about power plays and personal feelings. This is about a day old baby."

Sara ground her teeth; the chastisement was earned, but somewhat unexpected. Until now, she'd thought him oblivious to the tension between herself and Alec. Now, she knew that he had observed it perfectly well, and had just been waiting for them to work it out like the mature adults they were. The fact that he was bringing it up in explicit conversation meant they'd both failed. She stood up and left, suddenly unable to look her supervisor in the eyes.

~*~

"Exact same scene downstairs," Alec told her. "I've got prints and a pair of scrubs - blue this time. It's all bagged and tagged."

"And I've got good news." Sara pointed upwards. "About three years ago, Boston General installed security cameras in the entire maternity wing. None in the rooms, but the hallways and the nursery are covered 24/7."

"That _is_ good news," Alec said. "Did you get the tapes yet?"

"No, I just finished printing the nurses and going over the nursery. I've got the log book in evidence - we'll see if QD can match any of the signatures to McGeary's."

"So we can find out if she's somehow infiltrated here, too, or if her accomplice is another nurse," Alec finished her thought, and she flashed him a tentative smile. Thomas's uncharacteristic reprimand seemed to have done the trick.

"I've asked the PD to put a rush on the composite drawing they were going to do of McGeary so we can show it around here and see if anyone recognizes her." Sara paused for a moment. "Would you mind getting the tapes? I was just about to head up and talk to the mother."

Alec seemed to hesitate, obviously unsure about letting her talk to anyone with an emotional investment in the kidnapping. "Yeah. Sure."

He left, and Sara was once again able to find the mother's room by following the blue uniforms. The door was closed, and she rapped lightly on it with her knuckles, pushing it open at the muffled "Come in."

Caroline Whitten was sitting up in her bed, talking to Officer Nevins. She turned her head when Sara entered and smiled slightly at the criminalist.

"Ms. Whitten, I'm with the Boston Crime Lab," Sara introduced herself, setting her kit down on a small side table, careful not to hit the vase of cheery tulips that was already there. "I just have a few questions."

"Anything that helps," Caroline said eagerly, and Sara felt a twinge of guilt that she instantly liked this mother better than Monica Itzin. It wasn't really fair to compare them, especially when Caroline had at least fifteen years of maturity on the frightened sixteen year old.

"Do you know anyone who would want to take your baby?" Sara asked. Best to rule out a copycat first.

"No. No one."

"The baby's father?" she asked gently, knowing full well how far she was prying, and also how necessary it was for the case.

Caroline snorted. "He doesn't think it's his. He's...he's already married. It was a one night stand kind of thing when he and his wife were having some problems. He got back together with her the next day."

"I see," Sara pursed her lips. "What time did the nurse come to pick up...I'm sorry, I don't have a name listed here," she confessed, feeling vaguely disturbed.

"Andrea," Caroline supplied. "I hadn't...I couldn't decide on a name until just last night, and then she finally looked up at me and I settled on Andrea." She turned her head away, but not before the glint of tears was obvious on her cheek. She brought a hand up to wipe them away, and continued. "The nurse came right after eleven o'clock. She was new."

Sara froze, and all the equilibrium she'd been able to achieve over the past twelve hours was dashed away. She pressed the pen hard to the paper as she took notes, and tried to keep the trembling out of her voice as she continued. "You said she was new?"

"I hadn't seen her before," Caroline elaborated. "I have a good memory for faces."

"The artist should be here in about twenty minutes," Nevins supplied.

"Right. Okay." Damn, damn, damn. _Get ahold of yourself,_ Sara snarled inwardly. "Uhm, did she touch anything in the room?"

"No. Nothing. She just took Andrea and left." Caroline paused, obviously hesitant to continue. "Are you going to...I mean, I saw on the news tonight about that other baby..." Tears fell anew.

"We'll find her," Sara promised. _I just hope I can keep that promise._


	17. Chapter 16

"Grissom, now is really not a good time." Sara scrolled down another screen in the listing of Helen McGeary's bank records. If she had sold the baby, there should be some sort of indication in her deposits that she'd received money for the act.

"I wanted to see you." There he was, leaning against the doorjamb, looking in on her like he had dozens of times before.

She rubbed her eyes, trying to clear the blurriness from staring at the computer screen for too long, and pinched the bridge of her nose. "Okay, you've seen me. I'm really in deep with this case, Griss. I don't have time to talk."

"The kidnapping," he said, and moved into the room, effectively destroying her concentration.

She shoved backward from the computer. "Yes. The kidnapping. And if I don't get back to this, very soon there may be another baby in another plastic bag in another dumpster. A tiny little girl named Andrea, who should be with her mother right now, not some stranger."

"You want to talk about it?" he offered, now with his hip up on the table next to the computer.

Sara stared at him in disbelief. "This is really neither the time nor the place to discuss personal issues."

"I meant the case," he huffed, and she blinked at him, wondering how on earth she could have misinterpreted his initial statement to be personal. "We always...worked well together."

"Yeah. We did." She returned to the computer and scrolled down some more, then glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, almost shyly. "I miss that."

"Me too," he said. "Talk me through it."

She did so, keeping an eye on the bank screen. She'd almost gotten to telling him about the security cameras at Boston General when something jumped out at her from the bank records. "Whoa. He-llo. Transfer of Fifty thousand dollars to her account...that timestamp puts it as less than twenty four hours before the first kidnapping." Her fingers danced across the keyboard, totally engrossed in the hunt and oblivious of Grissom's presence. "Damn. It came in from a dummy account, somewhere in Switzerland. Impossible to track past that. _But_...here, she transfers it out again, from an ATM right outside of Boston City Hospital. Timestamp puts that transaction at eleven fourteen the night of the kidnapping. She did it right after she took Gregory." Impossibly, her fingers were moving even faster on the keys. "And she didn't bother to hide it this time."

Sara sat back in the chair with a satisfied smirk. "Jeremiah Catten."

"Sara!" Alec sounded out-of-breath as he stopped at the computer lab door. "PD just picked up Helen McGeary; she tried to buy a ticket out of town on her own credit card. They grabbed her at Logan - flight was delayed with all these new security measures, thank God - and they're bringing her in now. You coming?"

Both of their pagers took that opportunity to shrill loudly, and they looked down simultaneously; Sara was the one to read the message out loud. "Tim, 911. He must have gotten somewhere with the plastic bag."

They communicated silently across the gap, and Alec nodded. "I'll be in the interrogation room."

"And I'll be there as soon as I've seen Tim." Sara jumped up and grabbed the bank records from the printer. "Oh - Grissom - sorry, uhm..." He was just staring at her, so intently she fidgeted slightly and blushed. "What?"

He shook his head mutely, a slow, lazy smile teasing the edge of his lips. "I'll see you at the colloquium."

She blinked. "O-kay." With a small shake, she bolted from the room, papers in hand.

~*~

"Tim, if you've been able to get me something off that plastic bag, I'm going to nominate you for sainthood," Sara told him, breezing into the room.

"I'd rather you didn't," the thin lab tech said, pushing his rolling chair across to another table. "You have to be dead to be canonized. Here, take a look."

The plastic bag that Gregory Itzin had been wrapped in was under a fume hood. "I don't see anything."

"I didn't either, at first," Tim confessed, and with a laser pointer, brought her attention to a corner of the bag, near the opening.

"Thumbprint?" Sara asked, delighted. It was slightly smudged, but Tim was one of the best fingerprint techs in the country, even better than Jacqui in Vegas had been. He would be able to restore it enough to search from.

The tech held up an admonishing finger with a grin. "Male index finger. Right, to be exact."

"Right? Don't tell me you got a match," Sara breathed.

"I haven't gotten a match this fast out of AFIS in months," he informed her, his tone almost jubilant. "Three minutes, if that." He pushed his chair across to the database computer. "Jeremiah Catten, served time for fraud in '95."

"Anything you want, Tim," she promised him as he handed over the official documentation of the fingerprint match. "Anything."

"Just nail the bastard," he told her, and she was unable to hold back the huge grin as she bolted out of the lab and toward the interrogation rooms.

~*~

"I don't know what you're talking about," Helen McGeary was saying sullenly when Sara entered the observation room. She crossed her arms and leaned back in her chair, staring at Alec and Nevins across the table. "You'd better pay me back for my plane ticket."

"You can apply to the city for reimbursement," Alec said smoothly, shooting her a dazzling smile. Out of all the Boston night shift CSIs, he was the best at interrogation, and when he had as much weight of evidence as he currently did, he was like a force of nature. "And you're a smart woman, Ms. McGeary, so let's not play games here. Your fingerprints were found on Gregory Itzin and Andrea Whitten's bassinets. Your DNA was found in the pairs of scrubs left with both bassinets. We have two eyewitness mothers who can identify you as the nurse who took their babies."

McGeary remained silent, and Sara fought down an almost violent hatred of the uncooperative woman. She was responsible for the death of one baby, and the kidnapping of another, and she wasn't showing the slightest hint of remorse. 

"You've got nothing," she spat back. "How am I supposed to know you didn't plant that evidence?"

Nevins seemed barely able to control her anger, and Alec leaned forward across the table, speaking in a low, dangerous voice. "Boston CSI doesn't plant evidence, Ms. McGeary. And quite frankly, at this point, I'm not worried about being able to put you away for a very, very long time. All I care about is what you did with Andrea Whitten. Where is she?"

Sara couldn't take it any longer; she exited the observation room and came around to enter the interrogation room. 

"What do you mean, you don't know?" Alec was asking when she entered.

"I mean I don't know," McGeary repeated defiantly.

Sara sat down next to Alec and in front of Nevins, who was leaning against the wall. She slid the file folder containing both the fingerprint match and the bank record printout over to Alec to warn him where she was going next. "Does the name Jeremiah Catten mean anything to you, Ms. McGeary?"

"Who the hell are you?"

"That doesn't matter," Sara replied, allowing herself the slightest smirk of satisfaction. There had been a definite reaction to the name. "Answer the question."

"So what if it did?"

"Well, you transferred fifty thousand dollars to his bank account," Alec jumped in, holding the bank record up for the older woman to see. "And his fingerprint was found on the bag Gregory Itzin was wrapped in."

"You can tell it any way you want," Sara continued. "We know he was involved, and we're going to find him. But if you help us, it might get you a reduced sentence." As much as she hated the thought of this woman serving any less than the maximum penalty for her crime, they couldn't afford to be righteous when Andrea Whitten's life might be on the line.

McGeary's pale blue eyes darted from CSI to police officer and then back again. "I was telling the truth. I don't know where she is. Jerry has her, but I don't know where he is." She looked ready to spit. "Bastard took the money and ran off."

Sara felt all the energy she'd built up over the successive breaks in the case evaporate. "And you have no idea how to find him."

"If I did, you think I'd be leaving town?" McGeary snapped back. "Fifty thousand split two ways is still a hell of a lot of money. I'd be after him, getting my share."

"So instead, you chose to run," Nevins said, disgusted.

"Damn right I did."

The back and forth continued for several minutes, but Sara was convinced that McGeary had no idea of her ex-lover's whereabouts. Nevins stayed in the interrogation room when Sara and Alec left, quizzing the woman relentlessly about Catten's acquaintances, haunts, and other activities, and then the old-fashioned paper trail would start.

Sara looked at her watch as she and Alec walked down the hall together, silently simmering. Five o'clock. Two hours left in shift, and then two more hours before the day's panels and conferences started. Despite the sleep deprivation of the past few days, she was buzzed, desperate to find another lead in the case. If they were too late in finding Catten, and he had already passed on the baby to another link in the child extortion ring, they might never be able to recover Andrea. And Sara had made a promise.

They both sat down in the break room, still silent, and Alec passed a mug of coffee to her. She stirred sugar in absentmindedly.

"Let's walk it through," Alec said suddenly, setting his own mug back on the table after taking a sip. "Helen McGeary is an underpaid, underappreciated nurse with a bitter streak. She meets Jerry Catten."

"Two possibilities," Sara continued, blowing on the liquid to cool it off. "Either he's been involved in the business for a while, and he targeted McGeary specifically, or he came up with the idea."

"A combination of the two," Alec opted, and twisted the top off an individual pack of creamer. "He's got some experience in it, by the way he was able to get the money transferred from a Swiss account. He had contacts that put him in touch with buyers in the first place."

"But he didn't know enough to warn McGeary not to cover her tracks when she was transferring the money," Sara realized. "Either way, he was using her. The initial payment went to her account to deflect suspicion. He could always say that she was paying back a debt when she transferred the money to her. If it hadn't been for the fingerprint, we would never have gotten her to finger him."

"Makes you wonder why she didn't roll on him right away," Alec mused, ripping the creamer packet into shreds with manicured fingernails.

"She's in love with him," Sara said quietly, and he looked up at her abruptly.

"The question becomes, how do we find him?"

She shrugged. "Paper trail. Bank account, public records, old contact info from his prison time."

"Except I have the feeling that's all going to go cold, quick," Alec said, frustrated, and stood to throw the pieces of the creamer packet into the trash. He sat back down heavily. "He's not stupid. McGeary would have checked his apartment - he won't be there."

"We'll get a warrant anyway," Sara pointed out.

"Agreed." He stood to pour the dregs of his coffee into the sink. "You want bank records or the warrant application?"

"I'll continue with the bank records," was her choice, and she followed him to the sink to wash out her own mug. "I've already started with them anyway."

Alec nodded and began to leave the room.

"Hey, Alec?"

He stopped at the door and looked back in at her, an eyebrow raised.

"We work pretty well together, when we're not at each other's throats."

His smile was softly bemused. "Yeah. We do."

That was about as much emotional exposure as either of them could handle for the moment, and he left quickly. Sara hung her mug up and dried her hands, leaving to head back to the computer lab.


	18. Chapter 17

"You were right," Sara told him, disappointed, turning the wheel to follow the black and white police cruiser as it threaded its way through Somerville's maze of one-way streets and traffic lights. "The money was transferred out of Catten's account within an hour, via online banking, and sent on to a Swiss account. I was actually able to follow it one transfer further, but I lost it after it left a Liberian account for somewhere in the Caribbean."

Alec let out a low whistle. "He covered his tracks pretty well. I set the police to interviewing his listed next-of-kin, but the contact information in his prison record was old. They were only able to find one brother who hadn't seen him since '89 and seemed to indicate he'd love to turn him in if he knew how to find him."

"Charming," Sara said wryly, and pulled the van up to the curb as best she could. Unlike Vegas's slick Tahoes, Boston CSI had to content itself with old electrician's vans. It did make for more room to carry equipment, and some of them were even redone as portable labs, but...they handled terribly.

Jerry Catten lived on the fifth floor of an apartment complex whose better days looked to have been sometime during FDR's first term in office. There was no answer at the door, and the manager, an overweight woman who seemed perpetually nervous, fumbled the keys trying to unlock the door, her hands slick with sweat even in the icy cold of the hallway.

Once the officer had cleared the area, Sara and Alec entered - and stopped.

"Uh...which square foot do you want?" Sara asked, staring in amazement at the smallest studio apartment she had ever seen.

Alec shook his head slightly. "Doesn't really matter to me. I'll take the kitchen, if you have no objections." At Sara's shrug of indifference, he took the five steps to the counter that separated the tiny kitchen - featuring a tiny fridge, two countertop burners, and a sink.

Sara began with the fold-out couch. "I'm going to hit the lights for a sec." The ALS turned up several stains, and Sara marked them and turned the lights back on, folding the sheets carefully and placing them into an evidence bag. She knelt down to do a sweep under the bed with her flashlight; nothing except a stray sock and a few magazines, mostly the off-color kind.

"Got something." Sara stood up to see Alec holding a roll of clear plastic trash bags, identical to the one Gregory Itzin had been found in.

"Nice. Nothing here, so far. Few stains; I bagged the sheets." She continued searching inch by inch, but nothing jumped out at her; she bagged a pad of paper and a handful of receipts to go over back at the lab. Frustrated, she began printing, hoping to at least link McGeary to Catten.

"Nothing else," Alec said. "He must have changed this trash bag fairly recently, though."

Sara turned to the complex manager, who was nibbling on a hangnail as she watched from the door. "Where do residents put their trash?"

"Basement," the woman mumbled around her thumb.

"May we see it?" Alec asked, obviously straining to keep the impatient snap out of his voice.

The woman looked distinctly unwilling to let them search the basement, and Sara stalked up to her. "Listen to me. There is a day old baby missing, and Catten had something to do with it. Either you let us search the basement, or we go and get a warrant. Either way, we're going to do it. If you cooperate, you might save Andrea Whitten's life."

The manager caved quickly and turned, stumbling down the hall to lead them to the basement. Sara followed at her heels and Alec a few minutes later after instructing the officer to tape off the apartment; they hadn't found anything immediate to help them locate Jerry Catten.

There were no trash bags in the basement.

"I thought you said residents put their trash down here?" Sara rounded on the woman angrily.

"Trash came this morning," the woman filled them in unrepentantly, and Sara fairly vibrated with fury as she glared at the woman.

"Another dead end," Alec muttered from behind her.

~*~

Nine AM found Sara and Alec once more in the break room, and two shredded creamer packets by Alec's elbow as he studiously worked on a third. They'd returned to Catten's apartment but had found nothing further, even after two more hours of searching.

The new trash bag Alec had found lining the barrel under the sink matched to the roll, and it had been sufficiently distorted so that there was no way of matching the torn-off ends to the bag they'd found Gregory in. The pad of paper Sara had bagged contained directions to a Cambridge video rental store that specialized in adult films, and a comparison to his account there found he hadn't been in a week. The receipts were all for entirely innocuous items, and the newest was dated from five days ago.

There was nothing more they could do. A CSI's job was to follow the evidence - and they had followed it as far as it would take them. Further progress in the case rested entirely on the shoulders of the Boston Police Department.

"Sara, Alec." Thomas straightened his tie from where he stood in the doorway. "I heard about Catten's apartment. I'm sorry."

"Us too," Sara agreed dejectedly, and swallowed more coffee. "He's just disappeared." His tie registered in her brain, and she frowned slightly. "Why are you all dressed up?"

"I'm presenting on signature killers in an hour," he reminded her.

She jumped up so fast she almost spilled coffee all over herself. "Oh, God, the conference. I'm late, and it's the last day."

"You were on a case," Thomas reminded her. "A CSI can't have a better excuse."

"Still..." Sara groaned, sitting back down heavily and burying her head in her hands.

"There's nothing else to do," Alec pointed out. "I was just going to suggest we go home and get some sleep. The PD is going to page us if they have any breakthroughs."

She hesitated, torn, and very deliberately checked her pager's battery. Still three-quarters full. "Okay." She took a deep breath. "I'm going to swing home and change. And call Marianne on the way and let her know I might be pulled out. I hope I _am_ pulled out."

"Much as I want to sleep, I hope we're both called in an hour," Alec agreed, standing and stretching out his back with a yawn. "See you then."


	19. Chapter 18

"Have you ever taken a ride on the swan boats?"

It was a near thing, but Sara twisted her body back and managed to avoid the splash of coffee that leapt from her mug when she jumped. "Dammit, Grissom, don't sneak up on me like that."

"I didn't sneak up on you," he corrected. "Have you?"

"Not since freshman orientation," she told him. "They took all the out of state kids on a whole trip around Boston. We did the Freedom Trail, too. Is there...is there a point to this?"

"Would you like to go again?" he asked, and Sara was once again reminded of how very little she understood this man.

"Like, right now?" She stared at him.

"Yes."

"It's the middle of January, Griss," she reminded him. "The pond in Public Garden is frozen solid."

"Oh." His brow knitted together, and Sara felt a moment of wild disbelief. He hadn't realized that? Either he had been living in Las Vegas for entirely too long, or...she refused to let herself think that she'd managed to muddle his thoughts that completely. It was entirely out of character. "Then would you like to take a walk? Go get some lunch?"

Carl and Megan were eyeing them from across the room, and Sara felt distinctly like a goldfish in a tiny little bowl. "I'd like that."

They left the room where the coffee break was being held - and where sandwiches would have been catered in ten minutes, had they stayed for a public lunch - and began wandering the Harvard campus. 

"It's a beautiful area." Grissom was the first to speak.

"It really is," Sara agreed, her boots crunching ice as they walked along a path between two dormitories and came out into a courtyard, red brick buildings nestled in sparkling white snow. She was pretty sure they sold a postcard with this exact view at the college bookstore. It screamed New England prep school.

It had only been twelve or so hours since they'd last talked - his ill-timed visit at Boston CSI - and nearly twenty hours since their last walk, but somehow the air was immeasurably more clear than it had been even twenty-four hours ago. 

"When..." Grissom started to speak, and stopped, halting physically as well, digging at a layer of ice with his toe and then suddenly looking up at her. "When Ashleigh died, I had no idea what to do."

Sara's mouth suddenly went dry. It was the first time either of them had said her name since the funeral, and she felt tears spring to her eyes in automatic response as the memory of the day washed over her - Nick's hand in hers, the priest's voice echoing in the nearly-empty church, and the relentless heat of a Vegas day beating against the back of her neck as she placed an orchid on the tiny coffin.

"Catherine told me once...she said that the truth doesn't always bring closure. I didn't understand her then." He paused. "Finding out what happened is what I do, and once you find out what happened, it's over, and you move on."

A tear spilled over onto Sara's cheek, making its icy track down her skin before she reached up to scrub it away.

"I didn't know what to do," he repeated softly. "She was just gone, and there was no reason for her to be." He frowned, obviously searching for words - already, he'd been more open with her than he ever had. If he'd said any of these words when Ashleigh had first died, it might have saved their marriage. "I think...I overcompensated. I worked harder than I ever had. If I couldn't have my answers, I wanted to make sure that other people could have theirs. I tried to substitute their closure for my own."

"And I did the same," Sara echoed him, and rubbed away a second tear. "We're both workaholics, Griss. It was...our outlet. And the whole time, it just made the problems worse."

They didn't feel any need to vocalize what had happened next, but they were both remembering it. Their shared home had grown cold and empty as their conversation was reduced to the bare essentials. She remembered the first time he'd opted to sleep on the couch in his office rather than come home, and the first time she'd cried herself to sleep on Nick's couch. The polarizing of the night shift team as Catherine tried to comfort her oldest friend and Warrick his surrogate father, and Nick tried to protect Sara against the world. The primly worded memo that had made it clear that the administration of the Las Vegas Crime Lab did not at all appreciate the personal issues that were beginning to erode the efficiency of the number two lab in the country.

His utter lack of reaction when she'd turned in her leave of absence request.

Sara finally decided to break the silence of memory. "We never balanced. We never learned how to trust each other, or how to build a relationship. We just took the first plunge without thinking about it, and we kept riding that until..." She couldn't bring herself to say it, and wondered when Grissom had developed more emotional courage than she had. "Until we had to face the fact that we weren't having a marrige so much as a love affair."

That brought a slight smile to his face. "It wasn't always a bad thing."

She smiled in return. "No, most of the time it was good. It was really good. But we never fought. We never learned how to work through things." She threw her arms open to encompass the Harvard campus surrounding them. "See that dorm there? I lived there junior year, on the fourth floor. You can even see the window from here. I had a five foot by ten foot single, a poster of the periodic table on the wall, and I got so drunk at a hall party I threw up an entire night's worth of pretzels right under that street lamp there."

Grissom didn't understand her change of subject at all, and she didn't really blame him. "The only thing I know about your college years is that you went to UCLA, and the only reason I know that is because I saw your diploma on the wall in your office. We shared a house and a bed, and I still don't know why you know sign language."

"My mother," he said abruptly. "My mother was deaf."

She stared at him. "Otosclerosis," she said suddenly. "That's why you listed a family history of it on the medical forms."

"Yes," he confirmed, and shifted uncomfortably.

"It's genetic," she pressed.

"It's no longer a concern," he returned, and she could tell he was struggling to keep his tone of voice light. She was pushing too hard for today, and backed off.

"Okay." She started walking again, and after a moment's hesitation, he followed her. "But do you see the problem?"

"I think I do," Grissom agreed. "I'm a private person, Sara. You knew that before you married me."

"I guess I expected it to change, at least a little," she said wistfully. "I'm not demanding your entire life's history. But I don't think you can have a balanced relationship without some sharing." She tried a different tack. "How many people do we see in our line of work who have problems because they haven't learned how to communicate their issues with each other?"

"Far too many," he said on a sigh, and she thought maybe he finally understood.

"It would have been a problem sooner or later," Sara said, unable to look at him as they doubled back around and behind the dorm she'd pointed out earlier. "That's why I said we never should have gotten married in the first place. We never did the couple thing, Grissom. We never got to know each other beyond work, and that's just not enough to build a marriage around."

"I see," he said noncommitally. "There's a cafe here, if you're hungry."

The man would never cease to confuse her. "What?" He just looked at her. "Fine. Lunch."

She had a carrot muffin with cream cheese, and he had a ham sandwich. Sara didn't press him any further on what they'd talked about, but on the very edges of her awareness, she sensed that something had changed. Something subtle, but very big, and it would determine where they went next. But she was done with making the first moves. If Grissom couldn't meet her halfway, she had no intention of changing her mind about the divorce, and she would stay in Boston without a backwards glance. She'd gotten over him once. She would do it again if it killed her.

~*~

"What have you got for me?" Sara asked into her cell phone as she made her way back to the CSI van she'd taken to the conference. Her pager had gone off with a 911 message from the police department in the middle of a seminar on computer fraud, and she'd left as quickly as she could, opening up her cell phone as soon as she was in the hallway.

"Jerry Catten," Nevins told her, a triumphant tone in her voice. "He was picked up on a routine speeding stop on 93 in Wilmington. The cop recognized the name on the license and brought him in for questioning - drove him all the way down to us."

"You're kidding me," Sara said, stunned, as she leapt the snowbank to get to the driver's side of the van faster than doubling down to the end of the sidewalk.

"Nope," Nevins confirmed. "Guess the luck just went our way."

"The car?"

"It's being towed as we speak; ETA is another twenty minutes. They didn't touch it; my guess is, waiting for Boston CSI to process."

"Oh, wow." She felt positively giddy. "I'll be there in ten. Alec?"

"Already on his way. Another officer called him same time I called you."

"Great." She didn't bother to wait for Nevins to say goodbye before she ended the call and dialed Alec's cell phone.

"Tremain."

"Alec, do you want the car or Catten?"

"Catten," he replied immediately, and as much as she wanted to be in that interrogation room wringing information out of the smug son of a bitch, she knew this was one area in which she would have to bow to his superior skills.

"Deal," she replied, and ended the call again, weaving her way through Cambridge traffic to cross the bridge into Boston. 


	20. Chapter 19

Jerry Catten's car was a beat up Ford Taurus and looked every one of its 136,000 miles. The omnipresent white powder that coated dark cars in winter from the road salt was in abundance and rendered the color a dark gray instead of the black it had originally been.

Sara circled it for a few seconds, suited in gray Forensics coveralls, and decided to start with the trunk first. She popped the lock out in a practiced gesture, and held her breath - no baby. Sending a silent prayer, she checked for the evidence of blood and was doubly relieved when the test came back negative. Leaning in, she covered every inch of the trunk with no luck.

The back seat, however, was a different story. There were indentations in the beige fabric that suggested a baby's car carrier had recently been nestled there, and when Sara rolled the seat, she found an abundance of pink fiber - she bagged and tagged it with directions for Trace to match it to the examplar of a pink girl's baby blanket they'd taken from Boston General.

Car phone, with a hands-free ear jack - she bagged that, as well. They would trace the number, and it might give them some hint of where Catten had passed the baby on to. One thing was for sure, they were not going to find Andrea Whitten in Catten's custody. They had been too late.

Sara shoved that thought out of her head as she printed the door handles, steering wheel, and dashboard. The glove compartment yielded the car's registration, and maps of Masachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine - as well as one of Quebec.

"You were going to Canada," she said aloud to the empty car, and bagged the maps. Nothing further in the glove compartment; the cup holder had a half-empty McDonald's cup full of what looked like Sprite, and the ash tray was almost full, which would explain the smokey scent to the car.

But not to the apartment. Sara frowned, remembering. There hadn't been any ash trays in Catten's apartment, or any smell of smoke. She sincerely doubted he would take the care not to smoke in his apartment and then smoke in his car, an even more enclosed area. 

Carefully, she pulled the lighter out of its holder and bagged it to send down to fingerprinting. She also lifted a clear thumbprint from the froont of the fold-out ash tray, and a cigarette butt from the inside.

The between seats compartment held a handful of sticky change, crumpled gas receipts, and half of a very stale bagel. Sara wrinkled her nose in disgust, but bagged it all.

And that was all for the car, besides a great deal of sand and some crumpled straw wrappers underneath the seats.

For some reason, he'd been fleeing to Canada without even any baggage. Which didn't make much sense, but then...perhaps he'd been planning on coming back when the frenzy over Andrea Whitten's disappearance had died down, and had figured that his fat new bank account could cover any interim expenses. Maybe he'd had to leave in a hurry when McGeary had been brought in for questioning.

She wasn't going to get the answers in his car. Sara picked up a double armful of evidence bags and left the garage.

~*~

"One more time," Alec said, his voice deceptively pleasant. "Why did Helen McGeary transfer fifty thousand dollars into your checking account three days ago?"

"She owed me money. Look, how many times do I have to tell you this? Don't I get a lawyer or something?"

Sara crossed her arms from where she stood behind the two way mirror. Thomas was standing next to her.

"How long has he been singing this song?"

"Two hours," Thomas replied, his gaze intent on Catten.

"You are entitled to a court-appointed lawyer, but requesting one would be tantamount to an admission of guilt," Alec informed him.

It wouldn't. Perfectly innocent people brought their lawyers with them to questioning all the time. Catten didn't know that.

"Would you care to explain why your fingerprint was found on this bag?" Alec pushed a crime scene photo of Gregory's body across the table.

"You said Helen was in up to her neck in this thing, right?" Catten snorted. "Those are the same trash bags I use. She probably took one from my kitchen."

"Good answer," Thomas grunted.

"He's going to walk, isn't he?" Sara whispered in horror. He'd just used an easy way out to explain both of their pieces of evidence. His apartment had been clean. The fibers in his car would match to the baby blanket, but they didn't constitute beyond reasonable doubt.

"You and Ms. McGeary were involved?" Alec asked, trying a different tack.

"Yeah. I broke it off a few days ago. She was boring in the sack, if you know what I mean." He waggled his eyebrows, and Alec simply returned his lascivious gesture with a cool stare.

"That's funny, because she's implicated you in this scheme."

"Woman has enough bitter to last her three lifetimes," Catten said without even hesitating. "It doesn't surprise me that she'd try to pin something like this on me."

"And why did you transfer the fifty thousand dollars back out of your bank account to a Swiss account?"

"I've got debts, too," Catten snapped.

"Care to tell us about them?"

"No, I would not."

"He isn't getting anywhere," Sara said desperately. Her pager sounded - Tim, on a 911. Music to her ears. "That's Tim. I'll be back, hopefully with good news."

~*~

"How many miracles is the Church asking for, these days?" Tim asked her when she entered the lab.

"Two," she supplied instantly. "Only one, if you're martyred."

"If you promise to submit the paperwork after I die, I think I'm a shoe-in." He handed her a printed sheet.

"Evan Carmichael," she read. "This isn't an AFIS match."

"Nope," he said with a grin. "You remember about five years back, when they were doing that kindergarden fingerprinting initiative? Actually...no, you probably wouldn't. You weren't here. Anyway, all the local political types got their prints done in this big ceremony. It was a community building thing."

Tim tapped a computer monitor, where the Boston Globe article on the ceremony was displayed.

"State Senator Evan Carmichael helps six year old Francine Andrews to give her fingerprint card to Boston Crime Lab fingerprint technician Timothy Matthews as part of a statewide fingerprinting initiative," Sara read from a caption. Evan Carmichael was a tall, dark-haired man with a politician's smile. She shook her head in utter disbelief. "I wonder if he smokes."

"Like a chimney," Tim answered, wrinkling his nose in distaste. "He kept disappearing out the back door and coming back reeking of smoke."

"I'll petition the Vatican for early entry."

"I wonder if there's ever been a Saint Timothy before," Tim mused, but Sara was already out the door.


	21. Chapter 20

Sara had to grudgingly admire Jerry Catten for his utter refusal to give them any useful information, even after confronted with Evan Carmichael's fingerprints. He wouldn't tell them whether or not he himself smoked, and he told them he had no idea how a state senator's fingerprints had ended up in his car.

They had to go all the way to the chief of police and then to the Suffolk County District Attorney before they would get anyone to even consider bringing Carmichael in for questioning. Thomas woke Maggie up, who called an uncle, or a cousin - some sort of relative - who in turn called the appropriate people and told them in no uncertain terms to bring Carmichael in and to serve a search warrant on his house.

It was dinnertime, and Sara, Alec, and Officer Nevins decided to kill two birds with one stone and pay a visit to the Carmichael's Beacon Hill residence. The maid who answered the door looked terrified at the sight of the three determined investigators on the doorstep, and squeaked something about finding Mr. Carmichael for them right away.

"Can I help you?" he asked as he entered the room breezily, fastening a cufflink. "I'm afraid we're in a bit of a hurry. My wife and I are attending a charity function this evening. We enjoy giving back to the community."

"I'm sure you do," Alec said smoothly, and Sara had to admire his restraint. "This will only take a few minutes."

"Senator Carmichael, I have a warrant to search your house," Nevins told him, entirely unable to keep a smirk off her face.

"What is the meaning of this?" Carmichael snapped, immediately on the defensive. He grabbed the paper from Nevins's outstretched hand and examined it closely. "The Whitten baby. You think I had something to do with that?" Three hundred years of haughty New England breeding showed in every inch of his posture as he sneered down at them.

"We're researching all possible angles," Alec replied.

The baby's wail was evident to all of them, and Sara stood up, every maternal instinct in her crying out to go find Andrea Whitten. She didn't bother saying anything, just followed the sound. Vaguely, she heard Carmichael protesting behind her, but by that time she was taking the stairs two at a time and didn't even slow down.

The infant had her hands fisted in the air and her beet-red face scrunched up in fury as she screamed and twisted her body in the crib. A pale woman in a black evening gown stood by the crib, looking down helplessly as the baby continued to cry.

Sara crossed the room in three strides and reached into the crib. "Hello, Andrea," she whispered as she brought the baby close to her chest, cradling her head with one hand. Andrea's sobs subsided into cranky hiccoughs, and she drooled on Sara's neck, closing one tiny fist tightly around the collar of Sara's shirt. Completely oblivious to her surroundings, Sara rocked back and forth, making soothing noises as she blinked away tears. "It's going to be all right now, Andrea. It's going to be all right."

"Senator and Mrs. Carmichael, you are under arrest," Nevins said behind her, complete satisfaction in her voice.

~*~

"Hey."

Sara couldn't help but feel a sense of déjà vu as she leaned in the doorway to the office, right leg bent at the knee and tucked in front her left leg, arms crossed loosely in front of her.

"You look great, Sara," Carl said, smiling up at her from his desk. "What's up?"

"Can I talk to you for a sec?"

Confusion flickered across his face, and he blinked and gestured for her to enter. "Of course. Have a seat."

She shut the door behind her, setting her purse down on his desk and crossing her legs awkwardly to sit in the chair facing him. The closing reception for the forensics conference was later that night, and she'd dressed at her apartment before finding herself back wandering the halls of the lab in the maroon evening dress, an incongruous sight at best.

"I think...I owe you an explanation."

Carl sat up straight in his chair and shook his head vigorously. "No, I owe you an apology. It was my call to invite Gil to the conference when Dr. Olin couldn't make it. I shouldn't have pressured you that way." He winced. "I've never seen Thomas so angry in my life."

"Angry?" Sara prompted, intensely curious.

"He swore like a sailor. He's really protective of you, Sara."

"Thomas swore like a sailor."

"The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." She couldn't help it; she giggled, and he flashed a grin at her in turn. "It's good to see you smiling again. Hell, it's good to see you smile at all."

"I haven't really had any reason to for a long time," she said seriously, and pressed her palms into her thighs, breathing deeply.

"No," he cut her off before she could open her mouth to begin talking again. "You don't owe me anything. I should have respected your privacy."

Sara shook her head. "I need to tell you." She paused for a few seconds to gather her thoughts, and in the end, blurted out the first thing that came to her mind. "For thirty-six hours, I had a daughter."

He fell backward heavily in his chair; obviously, of all the things he'd expected to hear, that was not it.

"Her name was Ashleigh." The breath came out of Sara's lungs with a painful whoosh, and yet, strangely, she felt fine. "That's the first time I've said her name since we buried her."

"Oh, God, Sar," Carl whispered, and his fingers twitched on the desk as he stared at her.

Amazingly, she still wasn't crying. "I just...I needed to tell you. I ran away from the problems. They caught up to me." She stood, brushing imaginary dust off the dark dress. "I'm late, but...I'll see you there?"

Carl rounded the desk and enveloped her in a hug, and for a few moments, neither of them spoke. "Count on it," he finally mumbled into her hair.

~*~

"Somehow, I'm not surprised to see you here," Sara said, exiting the building to see Grissom leaning against his rental car. "You're going to get dust all over your suit."

He shrugged and pushed himself off the hood. "You did a good job on the Whitten case."

Damn him for knowing exactly what to say to make that warm curl of pleasure unfold in her stomach. "Talk to Thomas?"

"Listened to Thomas," Grissom corrected, smiling slightly. "He wouldn't let me get a word in edgewise."

"It wasn't just me," she pointed out. "Alec worked just as hard as I did."

Again he shrugged and smiled. "Need a ride?"

Sara was very tempted to say no, just to be perverse, but then she would have had to walk several blocks in the cold to get to the T station, and ride the T in her evening dress. She'd taken it to the station, but if there was an alternative, she wasn't going to refuse a warm ride to the downtown hotel the dinner was being held at. "Yeah."

Grissom held the door open for her in an absurdly charming gesture, and skimmed his fingers along her neck briefly, setting all the hairs on end. She shivered involuntarily and tried to crane her head around to look at him and see if she could discern from his expression what had caused him to do that - as if she ever could have - but he was already closing the door and moving around to his side of the sedan.

He didn't start the car right away, and they sat in silence, breaths chuffing out in white clouds. Sara folded her hands in her lap and looked down at them awkwardly. 

Finally, he turned to smile at her. "You look stunning, Sara, and you deserve every bit of praise that will be bestowed upon you tonight. I've never...given you that kind of praise. I should have."

Her jaw worked soundlessly for several seconds before she was able to whisper a shocked "Thank you."

Grissom started the car, and pulled out of the parking lot. A few seconds later, he reached over to tug her hands out of their tangle and slid his fingers through hers, his grip warm around her icy digits.

Sara leaned back against the headrest and smiled faintly at her reflection in the car window.


	22. Chapter 21

"Dinner, finally," Grissom said with a smile.

"Not exactly ideal," Sara told him, and jerked her chin toward where Carl was onstage, delivering the final address of the Boston Forensic Science Conference. Her hand was still firmly enveloped in his own.

"Nothing ever is," he whispered in her ear, and then leaned back in his chair to stay silent for the rest of the speech.

"Finally, this conference wouldn't have been possible without Marianne Ellory, our swing shift supervisor at the Boston Crime Lab, and Sara Grissom, from the night shift. They've both worked as hard as I have - probably harder, as they like to remind me frequently." The crowd laughed. "Furthermore, Sara not only put her heart and soul into this conference, she solved one of Boston's biggest kidnapping cases of the decade while doing so, along with CSI Alec Tremain, who I'm told is also in attendance."

Sara's brown eyes met Alec's cool blue ones across the room from where he sat with a leggy blonde, Maggie pouting at his other side. He inclined his head slightly and raised his wine glass to her with a ghost of a smile, which she returned. They were back to competitors, but the vicious edge was gone, and there was even some room for the lighthearted teasing she enjoyed with Jonas.

"So I'd like to have Marianne and Sara stand up and receive the accolades they deserve."

Carl seemed to have no desire to stay off her short list, if his behavior over the last week was any indication. Sara rose to her feet, her face beet red. Grissom still wouldn't let go of her hand, so she was forced to slump her right shoulder awkwardly to reach her full height.

The applause was nearly deafening, and Sara blushed even harder. She remembered Caroline's tearful gratitude, and decided she would rather have one of her thank yous than a roomful of the world's best forensic scientists clapping for her.

Finally, she was able to sit down, but not after glaring daggers at Carl. He winked at her in return, fully aware of her anger and how quickly it would pass. 

The meal was catered by one of Boston's most expensive restaurants, a five-course affair with champagne and finger bowls. Sara glanced sideways in surprise when the entrées were served, startled at Grissom's choice of the vegetarian dish, pasta with a light cream sauce and sautéed peppers and onions.

"You hate the sight of meat," was his answer as he finally let go of her fingers so that she could eat with both hands.

She rewarded him with a gap-toothed smile, and ate dessert left-handed, her right hand resting on her right leg, pinky and ring finger just brushing the side of his thigh.

The walk to his rental car was leisurely; she'd agreed to a ride home. Neither of them spoke as they passed Boston's landmarks, crossing the Charles into Cambridge and arriving at her apartment building a few minutes later.

Grissom parked the car, and Sara hesitated a brief moment before inviting him up. He twisted in the driver's seat to retrieve a manila folder that had lain on the backseat before getting out of the car, and resisted all attempts on her part to find out what it was, even dodging a few playful lunges on her part to snatch it out of his hands. She felt giddy, light, in a way that couldn't entirely be blamed on the two glasses of champagne she'd had with dinner.

The apartment was dark, and when she turned on the light, Grissom was staring at her in that intense way he had of telling her that he was studying her and appreciating every inch of her body. She shivered, her knees slightly wobbly as she looked at him over her shoulder, and then took a few steps into the apartment. Her eyes latched onto the coffee maker as if it were a lifeline.

"Do you want coffee, or tea, or something?" Suddenly, she was so nervous her stomach was churning, and she fought to keep her lips from quivering as she smiled at him.

"Sit down, Sara," he said, gesturing to the couch. If he kept looking at her like that, she would forget all the very good reasons she'd told him why their marriage had failed.

She sat down.

"This is for you," he told her, sitting on the coffee table as he had before and handing her the folder.

"Property of Las Vegas Police Department...wow, Grissom, I know you skipped Christmas, but you didn't have to..."

"Sara."

She clamped her lips shut on whatever it was she'd been planning on babbling after that, and opened the folder.

The divorce papers.

Signed.

Her entire world crashed down around her.

_This was what you wanted,_ she told herself. _It's the smartest decision all around._ Suddenly, she hoped he would leave soon, so he wouldn't see her cry again.

"Do what you want with them," he told her, his voice gentle. "I signed them the first day I got them, and had planned on mailing them off when Carl called me and asked me to fill in for Dr. Olin."

"And?" she prompted, not trusting her voice with anything more complicated than that.

"And then I realized I didn't really want to sign them," he said, and she let out the air that had been trapped in her lungs on a shaky sigh. "So I brought them to you, instead. I was hoping I could convince you to give me a second chance."

He reached across to close the file folder. "I went to UCLA. Junior year, I shared a double with a literature major from Virginia who used to read Shakespeare at the top of his lungs until three in the morning. I had a poster from Gray's Anatomy on my wall, though I never got so drunk I threw up underneath a lamp post."

The tears finally escaped. "I have been crying entirely too much around you lately," she informed him, and snuffled in an extremely unladylike fashion. He reached behind him and snagged a tissue from the box on the coffee table, handing it to her. "Thanks."

Grissom reached across her lap and took both her hands, his thumb skimming across her empty ring finger. He was, she noticed, still wearing his wedding ring, and she couldn't believe this was the first time she had seen that. "Do I get a second chance?"

Sara stared at him, completely dumbstruck, and opened and closed her mouth a few chance a few times before finally squeaking words out. "Uhm, I think it's only fair. I mean, you did fly across the country to come here, although I still think that may have been at least as much about the bugs as it was about me, and - "

She couldn't say anything more, because he was kissing her.

_fin._

* * *

Thanks to everyone who's enjoyed and reviewed this. It's definitely meant a lot! 


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